The novel closes with an elderly Rosette reflecting on the stream of the life she envisioned in the journal of her twenties - what might have been, what was lost, and what might yet be. DeWitt speaks in his own middle age of his western frontier homesteading, combining the characters of his parents while being at the same time his own man. Otis reveals his solitary and ambitious character, and Solomon is his foil - these two pursue life and love quite differently. Rosette tells her mother her dreams, and Sally discerns meaning her daughter does not see. In a style reminiscent of Willa Cather, in a family saga that recalls the work of Marilynne Robinson, this novel brings us enduring themes of human life as Rosette and her friends and family make the most of the American pioneer life first detailed for most of us by Laura Ingalls Wilder.Įach narrator - Rosette, her brother Solomon, her mother Sally, her husband Otis, and briefly their son DeWitt - offers his or her own perspective on the events, giving insight into themselves as well as the other characters. In lush detail, in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and sometimes rise from the wreckage.

We meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. Her real-life journal recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six decades, and the novel explores the truth. Almost-spinster schoolteacher Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell married Otis Churchill on a Michigan farm in 1857.

Blizzard by Cindy Rinaman Marsch