I've mostly made edits today. Not a lot of additional story line nor character development, but the typical English teacher I-can't-stand-for-my-verb-tenses-to-be-inconsistent stuff.
Lemme give you a little run-down. Let's see if your curiosity is piqued at all.
The story follows 3 generations: Maggie, her nephew Joe, and Joe's daughter Meg. I employ flashback throughout the entire novel - the stories run simultaneously, really.
Maggie is 15 in 1941. She lives on a Kansas wheat farm with her hard-working parents, a German Catholic family with only enough money to "get by" since their lives were hit hard in the Great Depression when Maggie and her 2 older sisters were small. One of the most exciting events in their lives is the annual county fair where the girls enter baked goods and livestock in competitions, and where they can "let loose" for an evening. Maggie meets a young man at the fair, a hired man who travels with the amusements. He woos her for two nights and leaves. A few months later, she realizes she is pregnant and is sent by her mother to have the baby at her eldest sister's house where the community & her father will not find out. Maggie must give the baby up for adoption before she can return to her family. While she is under the care of her sister and brother-in-law, she bonds strongly with one of the couple's children, a sickly little boy named Josiah (Joe). She cares for him tenderly and gives him the affection he lacks from his parents.
Flash forward to 1970. Joe is about 30 years old and has a young wife. He has graduated college, thanks to his Aunt Maggie's tutelage and financial support, with a degree in pharmacy, and is able to buy his own pharmacy after a decade of working tirelessly to earn enough money. He becomes a community success story, and when he has a daughter of his own (in the late '70s), he names her Margaret after his aunt. When the pharmacy comes into hard times in the mid '80s, Joe allows a partner to buy out 49% of the store to keep it up and running.
Meg is a curious and precocious young girl who is devoted to her dad and her great-aunt. She loves to spend time with both, and often writes about them in short stories. As a young adult she grows to wonder about a mysterious illness overtaking her father and about the hushed history of her great-aunt Maggie.
And that's all I'm going to say about that...
There's some great plot twists that I don't want to give away just yet, but this is the bare bones of it. Would you open it if it were a book in your hands?
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