Set for release on June 23, Heaven in a Wildflower, a novel by Cynthia Mines, opens in a prairie parsonage in central Kansas where Kristin Thorsen escapes her lonely existence through the Oz books of L. Frank Baum and stories of the magnificent 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
Set among
fields of emerald-green winter wheat, the story takes on Oz overtones when
Kristin is befriended by a neighbor widow and a local seed merchant on a
journey to trust her heart and summon the courage to explore beyond the vast horizon.
She leaves the prairie for Kansas City
where she is hired as a Harvey Girl at Union Station in the early 1920s and
ventures into the 12th and Vine jazz district.
“(The
author) has thoughtfully and lovingly distilled Kansas history into a
page-turning novel,” wrote Ted Ayres, producer/host of “Inside the Cover,” a
PBS Kansas program, in an advance review. “This coming-of-age story will
educate, inform, and entertain readers of all ages.”
For more than four decades, Mines
has researched Kansas history through roles as publisher-editor of Travel
Kansas magazine for 32 years, as a reporter for the Wichita Business Journal,
and as the author of the nonfiction book, For the Sake of Art: The Story of
a Kansas Renaissance, which was named a Kansas Notable Book in 2016. Her
award-winning freelance projects have included travel articles for the Los
Angeles Times, the Kansas City Star, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Fodor’s travel
books. This is her first novel.
A sneak peek of the book will be available
during a book signing hosted by Hemslojd during Midsummer’s Festival on June 20
in Lindsborg, Kansas, the prototype for the Swedish-settled community at the
heart of the book.
The 360-page book will be available
after June 23 in hard cover ($38), paperback ($25), ebook ($12) and audiobook narrated
by Marsha Hoover ($16) wherever books are sold. The book has been certified
free of AI by the Authors Guild.
Meadowlark Press, established in
Emporia in 2014, publishes novels, memoirs, poetry and children’s books with a
focus on Midwestern settings and authors. Meadowlark Press also awards the
annual Birdy Prize to the best full-length collection of poetry nationwide.
To order, visit meadowlarkbookstore.com
More
information about the author is at cynthiamines.com.
