hope as wide as a prairie sky

America's nineteenth-century immigrants. Bold, gutsy, resilient. Pioneers who prayed not for a life without suffering, but for the strength to prevail through the death and despair they knew were coming. Families who could have turned their losses into bitterness, but chose hope instead. This is the story of one such family-the daughter of Swedish immigrants and her Swedish-immigrant husband, the author's maternal grandparents, Gedia and Elof Johnson. It is the memoir the author imagines her grandma could have written, a book of joyful and funny and grief-filled memories arranged on the page in such a way that suggests the furrows they plowed and the wide-open prairie where they planted their lives. Using Gedia's plain-spoken voice, the author describes the trials faced by her great-grandparents as they struggled to settle the tallgrass prairie of Minnesota, the triumphs that frontier living in Canada brought Gedia and Elof, and the tragedies that befell them in Montana. How did they keep body and soul together through drought and dust storms, the Depression and the death of three children? In her down-to-earth, tough-as-nails style, Gedia gives us the answers.