kansas

Lane is just fifteen when her mother commits suicide. She is sent from New York City to western Kansas to live with her grandparents. Even though she’s never met them, they claim to love and want her. As Lane adjusts to life away from the dysfunction of her mentally ill mother, her idealistic image of the farm blends with her mother’s version to form a reality she wants no part of.

But home and family are hard to root out, and when her cousin Allegra goes missing, Lane is dragged back into the dysfunction she thought she had escaped when she left Osage Flats ten years before.

There’s a lot

Anna, a Gold Ribbon Safety Citizen is prepared for anything except moving from her beloved Colorado home to her father’s small Kansas hometown.  Her father, a minister, is called to accept this post until a replacement can be found.   Most of Oakwood's townspeople are related but she eventually embraces them and their unique ways.  Anna has a bumpy ride from the first but she soon comes to see things differently.  This book would be appropriate for ages 8-12.

Author Cheryl Unruh revels not just in the expansive Kansas landscape but also its people and places. In Flyover People: Life on the Ground in a Rectangular State, she explores Kansas through perceptive vignettes that show her affection for the state. Hers is a Kansas of small-town friendliness and helpful neighbors, a Kansas that is notorious for extreme weather as well as glorious sunsets and the beautiful Flint Hills. The author vividly describes the vast expanse of prairie with “long-tailed trains slicing through the countryside” and the setting Kansas sun “crossing the finish line in a

      Addie of the Flint Hills is the autobiography of Adeline Sorace, born in the Flint Hills of Kansas in 1915.  Now, while overlooking New York city from her high-rise apartment, Adeline recounts her life.  Her grandparents were among the earliest settlers in this territory and came to Kansas on a covered wagon. She recounts her memories of the prosperous 1920s, cattle herds and cattle auctions, life during the Great Depression, the comings of the dust storms and droughts and later times when here father had to go away to find work.  Addie’s memories transport the reader back into the

Evelyn Bucknow is at the center of everything. From her vantage point, the ten year old narrator of local author Laura Moriatry’s richly nuanced novel sees all sides. She lives smack in the center of the United States with her single mother and disabled brother in a cheap apartment outside small-town Kerrville, Kansas. As she grows into a college-bound young adult, Evelyn witnesses the battle between her compassionately rebellious but immature mother and her loyal and stable but judgmental grandmother. Escorting her mother to sign up for food stamps, Evelyn worries what President Regan

As author Ande Parks points out in his afterword, Capote in Kansas is not entirely factual. This graphic novel does deal with the research Truman Capote did in composing In Cold Blood, but Parks has mixed in fictional elements as well.

In November 1959, Perry Smith and Dick Hickok murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote's book, published a few years later as a "nonfiction novel," became one of the best-selling books of the 1960s and a "true-crime" classic.

In Capote in Kansas, Parks and illustrator Chris Samnee give an accounting of Capote's time in western

After reading Pickard’s first standalone suspense novel The Virgin of Small Plains, I have been impatiently awaiting her next novel. I have not been disappointed; Nancy Pickard has confirmed again that she can deliver a great mystery. The Scent of Rain and Lightning is a fascinating tale of past and present in a close-knit Midwestern community. The story is set in a small fictional town of Rose, Kansas. The story opens as the main character, Jody Linder, finds out that Billy Crosby, the man who was convicted of murdering her father has been released from prison and is coming back to town. Jody

If this book doesn't make you want to put your McMansion up for sale and load up your spoiled Johnson County children and head to Western Kansas for a slice of real life well I don't know what will. Yes, A Perfect Season is about high school football, some of the best in the state. But truly it is the story of a community of men and women, teachers, coaches, lunch ladies, everyone in fact loving, guiding and supporting the children and young adults, whether or not they play football for the legendary Redmen. It also is about kids who are made to work and to be held accountable for their