About this item
It's 1942, just a month after the United States entered World War II. Lark, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty are in a station changing trains, leaving their lives in Harvester, Minnesota behind, and waiting for the train going to Los Angeles. Young men — soldiers — swarm the platform, heading off to war. Against this dramatic backdrop, Gardenias revisits Faith Sullivan’s most beloved characters from The Cape Ann, taking them from their hometown to new lives, new dreams, and new risks. Arlene has left her husband behind after he gambled away the money she'd saved to finally build the Cape Ann house of her and Lark's Depression-era dreams. As a new life takes shape in San Diego in a wartime housing project full of neighbors they know little about, Lark wonders, as does the reader, if a dream means losing everything of value or finally finding it.
About the Author
One of Minnesota's best loved writers, Faith Sullivan was born and raised in southern Minnesota, and is the author of four novels set in the fictional town of Harvester, Minnesota: Gardenias (2005) , What a Woman Must Do (2002) , The Empress of One (1997) and The Cape Ann (1988) . Before these she published a contemporary fantasy, Mrs. Demming and The Mythical Beast (1988) , a thriller, Watchdog (1983) and the humorous Repent, Lanny Merkel (1981, with deep debt, she says, to PG Wodehouse -- and now on Kindle) , also all set in Minnesota. Devoted to her readers, Sullivan estimates that she has visited over 1,000 different book clubs to speak about her books.
She lived twenty-some years in New York and Los Angeles, returning to Minnesota often to keep her roots planted in the prairie. A "demon gardener, flea marketer, and feeder of birds," she currently lives with her husband in Minneapolis. They have three grown children.?
