Joshua Ryder ashamed of being an outlaw's son and convinced he carries bad blood, leaves Texas in the spring of 1876 with a trail herd of longhorns bound for Montana. The following spring, he heads west with plans to settle near the Pacific Ocean and live in solitude with just his books and his horses for company. But a Nez Perce woman and her baby change his plans and he ends up in Virginia City, Montana.
There an old washerwoman, a small half Chinese girl, and a young woman with red curls further complicate his life. When he is framed for murder Josh weighs his options. If he runs far enough and fast enough he can probably shake the law. If he stays and tries to clear his name, undoubtedly, he'll hang. Either way, he will lose the respect of those he's come to love.
Joshua Ryder is eight when his mother is murdered. An old cowboy becomes the father he has never had and when he is dying asks Josh, now eighteen, to leave the ranch with their neighbor, Miguel, and get some experience working for another outfit. Riding Shadow, the buckskin he's raised from a colt, Josh comes to the Rawlins' ranch and hires on to help drive a herd of longhorns to Kansas. Martha Rawlins, the widowed ranch owner and her children, accompany the herd and she teaches Josh to read and write while on the trail. He becomes friends with the Rawlins' son, falls in love with the older daughter, and adores her little sister, Kit. Another tragedy again changes the course of Josh's life and he heads back to Texas to hunt down the man who murdered his mother.
Dust storms, rabbit drives, hobo camps, and riding on freight trains were all a part of life for many throughout the Midwest during the Great Depression. Polio and many other diseases had not yet been conquered and the huge dust storms that killed livestock and ruined crops also caused life-threatening respiratory ailments, such as asthma and pneumonia. In the spring of 1935, thirteen-year-old Brady Foster's family is forced to leave their "dusted out" wheat farm in southwest Kansas when his mother's asthma takes a turn for the worst. Deciding her only hope lies in California's cleaner air, Brady and his little autistic sister are sent to live with their grandfather, a county sheriff in the north central part of the state, until their parents can return. In his new school, Brady is bullied and ostracized, but he finds a friend in Eddie Peel, the son of the town drunk, a boy with a pet crow. This book was selected for the Kansas State Reading Circle Catalog and Winner of the J. Donald Coffin Memorial Book Award!
Maggie Rose and Sass explores the differences between two races and the culture of the times. The novel is set in 1888 in a fictional town based on Nicodemus, Kansas, a town settled ten years earlier by ex-slaves from Kentucky. Life in Georgia with an ugly-tempered, racist grandmother has not prepared the orphaned Maggie Rose for Solomon Town whose citizens are almost all black. Sass has lived all her life in Solomon Town, the daughter of an ex-slave mother and a free-born, educated, mixed-race father. Raised in such totally different cultures, the two girls are bound to clash.
