In the flat farmland of rural Manitoba, two families exist in separate worlds that a single summer will bring into collision. Mrs. Francis, educated and well-to-do, has theories about motherhood pulled from the latest books. Mrs. Watson, exhausted and practical, has nine children and no time for theories. When Mrs. Francis descends upon the Watson household to share her ideas about child-rearing, she finds something her reading never prepared her for: the stubborn warmth, chaotic joy, and hard-won wisdom of a family that has nothing but each other. At the center stands four-year-old Danny Watson, watching everything with the peculiar clarity children possess, asking questions that no adult wants to answer. Nellie L. McClung, writing at the height of her powers as a Canadian suffragist and social reformer, weaves comedy and social critique into a story that remains startlingly fresh. This is a novel about what we owe each other, and whether the comfortable can ever truly understand the struggling. It is also, quietly, a feminist tract dressed in the costume of prairie realism.
