Jan of the Windmill: A Story of the Plains

The novel opens on a ferocious storm sweeping the plains, the windmill grinding, and a family in crisis. The windmiller's wife has just lost her youngest child, her grief raw and possessive. Then a stranger arrives with an orphaned infant, and her husband insists they take the child in - for practical reasons, he says, but the baby will demand everything they have left. Jan enters this wounded household as an outsider, and slowly, incrementally, he earns the love that was never meant for him. Ewing writes with psychological precision about grief's ugly truth: how loss can make us cruel before it makes us wise, and how the heart can resist the very thing it needs to heal. This is a Victorian children's novel that treats its young protagonist with absolute seriousness - no sentimentality, just the quiet heroism of a boy who refuses to stop loving people who haven't yet learned to love him back. It endures because it understands that resilience isn't grand; it's showing up, again and again, to a home that hasn't learned to want you.