Flats Junction

When her tinsmith father and brothers head West, Polish immigrant Marie Kotlarczyk has no choice but to go along. Family, after all, is family. The Dakota Territories are anything but welcoming to the Kotlarczyks, and as the months trip by, Marie must pick up the hammers she’s secretly desired but also feared. When she faces the skeptical people of Flats Town, the demands of the local Army commander, and her public failures, her inner voice grows destructively, forcing Marie to decide exactly who she is and what it means to be a woman smith.

Proper Boston widow Jane Weber moves to the Dakota Territories under layers of lies to save her reputation. Stirring up controversy, Jane rooms with the last Blackfoot Sioux in town while navigating a mercurial friendship with the fiercely independent town grocer. In Flats Junction, though, everyone has an untold story. Battling her shortcomings, falsehoods, and swallowing her inherent curiosity, Jane must choose how she will truly reinvent herself, and where she belongs.

No one takes a woman seriously in the Dakotas, least of all a woman of mixed race who owns the only general store in Flats Junction. But Kate has never let her heritage or gender stand in her way. Not even when shy, Boston-bred widow Jane moved to town and stole her beloved. Not even when her Lakota mother was forced to flee after her house mysteriously burned down.

Dr. Patrick Kinney is no ordinary man, not least for his tenuous position as the only medical professional in Flats Junction. He's met his match in the widow Jane, in more ways than one, but together they struggle against disease, injuries and the stubborn resistance of frontier folk to medicine and healthcare.

Did men truly conquer the frontier, or was it the women who quietly traded hopes and dreams in a gamble to build something even bigger for themselves and their families? In Flats Junction, sacrifices grow ever starker as the town begins to realize it faces an existential crisis on multiple fronts. Enigmatic storekeeper Kate has ambitions to become more powerful than her father, but to do so requires making deals with many devils to bring electricity and a hospital, perhaps to Flats Junction's detriment.