A pregnancy pact between three teenaged girls puts their mothers' love to the ultimate test in this emotionally wrenching story of love and forgiveness. (Catalog summary)
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl -- her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house -- is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.
Based on an actual account from 1650, a servant girl made pregnant by the master’s grandson is hanged after her baby is found dead. What happens after a shy young doctor sees her eyelids flicker on the dissecting table makes for edge-of-the-seat reading.
