Best Historical Fiction

  At 32” no one expects anything from her and everyone wants to protect her. As much as she appreciates the protection and love of her family, she still wants something more from life. Coming from a small town, she craves the big world. With her intelligence and ambitious spirit, she goes on to become a legend, dining with Presidents, Vanderbildts, and Astors among others. Massachusetts, late 19th century. Mercy Lavinia “Vinnie” Warren Bump is raised on a family farm. Through her hard work and diligence, at sixteen-years-old, she becomes a primary school teacher to a surprise of many. She has proved that her size has nothing to do with her mind or even her will. From an early age she used her talent for singing to sooth her classmates with ballads. Having her mother crying over Lavinia’s lonely and loveless fate, Lavinia becomes even more restless. When a man, who claims to be their cousin, appears at their house and offers her a position in his show on the floating boat on Mississippi

 1934. Rosa Jean graduates with Masters in Geology and secures a government position at Soil Erosion Department in Vanham, Kansas, where she is from. On her way there, she experiences her first duster. As the wind and dust rage, you can’t tell if it’s day or night. As she continues her way, she sees what time did to the surrounding land as well as the effects of 1929 market crash, which plunged the wheat prices. It seemed like coordination, when rain stopped, too. Most fields failed to produce. Drought was part of the Great Plains, but the true reason, she learned in college, was the man controlling the land, instead of working in harmony with it. Once, settled in Vanham, another storm comes. She is told, it’s a sandstorm this time. Then another duster comes, and another, and another. There are other obstacles. She isn’t that welcomed as a woman in man’s field. When a hundred-pound bag of seed needs to be loaded on the track, she is told to help herself; a woman of petite size. Afterwa