The Prairie Blooms

In the fifth book of the Homesteaders series, fourteen-year-olds Signe and Elna are preparing for a future as teachers. They are encouraged to take the teacher’s examination early (teachers being in short supply on the prairie), and they pass it, enabling them to take teaching positions in small neighboring communities in the fall, when they are both only fifteen years old. It is difficult work for girls who are inexperienced and not much older than some of their students. Signe seems to settle into it, but Elna struggles, and she questions her desire for a career outside the home. However, the girls have witnessed the terror that a friend’s mother has suffered at the hands of an abusive husband, and they have determined to build for themselves a life that is their own, unreliant on a man—especially the bachelors who come courting the single young teachers.

But when the man in question is Trygve, who is seventeen now and as good and kind a person as one could hope to find, Elna’s vision of the future shifts. The three teens are no longer children; they are maturing into responsible, independent adults who are ready to carry forward the dream that drove their families to homestead in America. In the summer of 1871, it is not just the prairie that blooms, providing the homesteaders with its life-sustaining bounty; it is the youngsters themselves.