While it may be true that there is no place like home, what happens when you grow up without a mother and nowhere feels like home? A poignant coming-of-age story set in the early twentieth century, Heaven in a Wildflower explores the timeless question: Where is home?
Kristin Thorsen struggles to put down roots on the Kansas prairie after her aunt sends her to live in a country parsonage with her father, a pious Lutheran pastor so consumed by religion that he barely notices his only child. Her mother, who died after giving birth to her, is buried in the graveyard next to the church and parsonage.
On her first day at the austere parsonage, Kristin notices that the hands on the only clock do not move and wonders if it has not been wound since her mother died eleven years earlier. Time passes slowly at the lonely parsonage causing Kristin to retreat further into her imagination where she finds solace in books, Swedish folktales, and stories of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
Her favorite book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, provides a lens through which she views the people and places around her. Set against a backdrop of emerald fields of young wheat, the novel evokes the journey to Oz as Kristin is befriended by a neighbor widow and a seed merchant as she tries to find her voice and trust her heart.
As a young girl, Kristin's stutter makes her hesitant to speak, but she is a keen observer of the world around her as she searches for her place in it. Out on the vast prairie, Kristin can see the horizon in every direction, but she knows little about what lies beyond it. She catches glimpses of the wider world-which her father fervently mistrusts--through teachers and immigrant friends.
While Kristin finds the prairie to be as harsh and unforgiving as her father, she discovers talismans in occasional wildflowers and carpets of winter wheat so hardy they remain green all winter, even when blanketed by snow.
After seeing a Harvey House advertisement in the newspaper, Kristin works up her courage to take a train to Kansas City, where the jazz age is dawning. When her father becomes seriously ill, she returns home to find herself at a crossroads: accept a marriage proposal that would mean a secure home on the prairie or venture out into the world alone.
The novel takes place during and after World War I and is written as a memoir by Kristin for her own daughter as a way to fill the long nights while her husband is away during World War II. Her recollections of world wars, devastating droughts, a global epidemic, persecution of immigrants, gender inequality, and religious intolerance are issues that will resonate with readers more than a century later.
