A Fireproof Home for the Bride

Emmaline Nelson and her sister Birdie grow up in the hard, cold rural Lutheran world of strict parents, strict milking times, and strict morals. Marriage is preordained, the groom practically predestined. Though it’s 1958, southern Minnesota did not see changing roles for women on the horizon. Caught in a time bubble between a world war and the ferment of the 1960’s, Emmy doesn’t see that she has any say in her life, any choices at all. Only when Emmy’s fiancé shows his true colors and forces himself on her does she find the courage to act—falling instead for a forbidden Catholic boy, a boy whose family seems warm and encouraging after the sere Nelson farm life. Not only moving to town and breaking free from her engagement but getting a job on the local newspaper begins to open Emmy’s eyes. She discovers that the KKK is not only active in the Midwest but that her family is involved, and her sense of the firm rules she grew up under—and their effect—changes completely. A FIREPROOF HOME FOR THE BRIDE has the charm of detail that will drop readers into its time and place: the home economics class lecture on cuts of meat, the group date to the diner, the small-town movie theater popcorn for a penny. It also has a love story—the wrong love giving way to the right—and most of all the pull of a great main character whose self-discovery sweeps the plot forward. The setting is Kent Haruf, but the heroine is pure Annie Proulx.

"An engrossing tale of intrigue, deceit and racial unrest in the upper Midwest in the 1950s, A Fireproof Home for the Bride is a fresh take on a pivotal moment in American history." –Christina Baker Kline, #1 bestselling author of Orphan Train

"A strong-willed farmer's daughter comes of age in the Minnesota sugar beet fields, where romance fuels her dreams, but dark secrets threaten to upend them. Emmy Nelson's eager pursuit of a life beyond the confines of her narrow 1950s upbringing leads her into danger--and her courage exposes decades of corrupt piety and shocking evil. A Fireproof Home for the Bride fascinates with its postwar period detail, and bravely travels to corners of the heartland where everyone has secrets, and wholesomeness is not as it appears." —Kate Manning, author of My Notorious Life

"A Fireproof Home for the Bride is an engrossing, quietly profound story of a young woman’s coming of age in the deceptively bucolic Upper Midwest of the 1950s. Its nuanced, utterly real characters and tantalizing revelation of secrets will keep readers　turning the pages." —Jennifer Chiaverini, author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker

Set in the shifting landscape of North Dakota at the end of the 1950s, A Fireproof Home for the Bride is a subtle coming of age story, as well as a remarkable portrait of racism's sinister hold on rural America. Emmaline Nelson is a wonderful heroine: a fierce, smart, independent woman you'll be cheering for long after the novel is over. –Haven Kimmel, New York Times Bestselling Author of A Girl Named Zippy

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