The Happy Venture

Their mother has gone to the sanatorium. Their father is struggling to keep the family afloat. And the old farmhouse they're meant to call home is barely more than a roof over settling bones. But the three Sturgis siblings, practical Felicia, troubled Kenelm, and dreaming young Kirk, refuse to let hardship define them. Kirk wanders the rural landscape with the unshakeable conviction that something miraculous waits just beyond the next hill, and his encounters with a mysterious figure he calls the Maestro hint that magic might be closer than anyone believes. Edith Ballinger Price captures something essential about childhood's fierce capacity to transform a crumbling farmhouse into a kingdom and scarcity into abundance. This is a story about the quiet heroism of siblings holding together what their parents cannot, about learning to find joy not in spite of difficulty but within it. For readers who believe that love and imagination can make a home anywhere.