About this item
In frontier historical novel River with No Bridge, Nora Flanagan, at age eighteen, leaves Boston in 1882 to marry a miner in Butte, Montana. She anticipates achieving the respectability and security denied her as a tinker's daughter in Ireland. Instead, she experiences tragedy, disgrace, and redemption. Three men love her: her husband who dies in a mine explosion; the secretive gambler who abandons her, leaving her pregnant; and half-Chinese Jim Li who becomes her life partner despite prejudice against them. In the course of her life, Nora survives her daughter's death, relinquishes her son, homesteads in the wilderness, and raises a Blackfeet girl. She learns to cherish the beauty and healing power of nature surrounding the North Fork of the Flathead River.
About the Author
The author of two books for young adults, Karen Wills practiced law and taught English at the college level. She also taught Lakota teens at an alternative school, and, most recently, Inupiaq Eskimo children in the remote village of Wales, Alaska. She has the distinction of experiencing a personal encounter with a polar bear. Her work has appeared in numerous publications. She has grown children and lives with her husband near Glacier National Park in Montana.
Her first novel, Remarkable Silence, was inspired by the need now, as never before, for religious tolerance.
Her second novel, River with No Bridge, reflects her admiration for those immigrants who defied poverty and prejudice and settled on the great frontier of the wilderness near what is now
Glacier National Park.
