In 1910, a missionary visitor arrives at Sophiny Mumms convent boarding school in Concord, Kansas. Sophiny is smitten. Her best friend Antoinette Dominguez is notand begins a series of strange behaviors breaking all the rules. From Sophiny she extracts three promises, a trunk exchange, and a staged fight before she elopes. Shortly thereafter, Sophiny learns that the missionary is not who he pretends to be and that her friends elopement has resulted in a mysterious disappearance. Antoinettes puzzling diary gives clues about guardians who cause us to lose our way. The missionary reappears, and Sophiny is launched on a travelers tale of her own to search for her missing friend. In the investigation of puzzling enigmas, Sophiny has to use all the resources of emerging womens rights, family relationships, social networks, the new technologies (telephone, photography, and transportation), and patron saints.
About the author
Barbara Mueller recently retired from teaching English at a Southern California community college. For twenty-eight years, she taught composition and literature courses, including critical thinking, women’s literature, and Bible as literature. She now has time to think about the larger issues of what her grandmothers left her and what she wants to leave her grandchildren. Barbara grew up in Kansas and attended the same convent boarding school her grandmother attended. She loved the experience, as she knows her grandmother did. This is her first novel inspired by that experience, but all names, places, and events have been fictionalized.
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