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Lives of girls and women, Prairie edition
"Because no matter how far away we were, you and I, we could never shake the prairie dust, this puritan prairie dust which blows and blows and blinds us to all that is real and happy."
A very young girl expresses her anger on the piano when her gravely ill sister commands all of her mother's love. A caustic teenager observes the ladies of town as her former music teacher reappears with an exotic new husband in tow. An unmarried woman is desperate to keep the niece she has raised since infancy when her brother returns from the city to claim her. Bitter truths, illicit yearnings, and doomed dreams emerge during the final summer gathering at a couple's beloved home.
Written in the early fifties, when the author was barely 20, these stories offer exquisite depictions of the very young, pitch-perfect snapshots of eternal teenage cynicism, the sorrows of mothers who foresee the lives of their daughters in a flash, and the muffled private heartbreak of women life has swept aside.