Where the Bluestem Unites

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Kansas, 1954. Ruby Smucker inherits the farm her mother spent thirty years holding together, and she intends to keep it. What she does not plan for is her sister Joanie coming home, a German farmhand named Franz Weber arriving at her lane looking for work, or the slow, difficult business of learning what it means to let people in.
Over the next seven years, Ruby will expand the farm, fight for a loan, bring two more men off the road and give them something to work toward, and stand at a bank table in Salina with her sister beside her and watch a stranger read their numbers and recognize what they have built. She will fall in love the way a woman falls in love when she has spent most of her life being entirely capable without it: carefully, and only once.
And on a May morning in 1961, she will take her four-year-old daughter up the hill to the stones, and name every person buried there, and wait for the girl to ask the right question.
The bluestem has roots that go ten feet down. Past the frost line. Past the drought. Nothing ordinary pulls it up.
This is the story of what holds.

This is the fifth book in the acclaimed Bluestem Series, Where the Bluestem Unites. It can be read as a standalone novel or as the next chapter in a multigenerational saga of the women who built something that lasted on the Kansas prairie.