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1891 – Florida
Irish immigrant Margaret Murphy has many talents, but waitressing isn’t one of them. A hotel waitress job in pioneer Florida is her last chance to help her family stave off starvation. But she’s in danger of being fired. Will the love that blooms with a fellow worker, an immigrant from Italy, be a saving grace or a complicated distraction?
Stitching a Life in Persimmon Hollow
1888 – Florida
In At Home in Persimmon Hollow, readers’ hearts were captured by Agnes Foster as she built a new life for herself in a very special frontier town amid the Florida wilderness—and found love along the way. Now, in the second novel of the Persimmon Hollow Legacy series, we meet starry-eyed seamstress Josefa Gomez.
Living with her aunt and uncle, the housekeeper and caretaker at Agnes and Seth’s Taylor Grove compound, Josefa longs for the glamorous life of a fashion designer far beyond her small town. But her dreams of designing exquisite gowns for rich women in Paris and New York alarm her Tia Lupita, who fears that Josefa’s ambitions are unrealistic for a girl of her station. In late 19th century America, a Mexican woman’s best prospect may well be a suitable marriage and a position in the household of a kind employer. When Lupita announces a plan for Josefa to move away from Persimmon Hollow to live with distant relatives in Texas and prepare for an arranged marriage, the headstrong beauty knows she has to make an audacious choice.
Will Josefa follow her dreams of glamor or submit to her aunt’s plans for stability and security? Can she find a way to use her gifts in a truly productive way? And when a choice arises between two suitors, will she choose a rich man who could give her all the outward trappings she desires, or a quiet carpenter who has fewer material goods—but a bigger heart?
1886 – Florida
At Home in Persimmon Hollow is the first book in a series chronicling the world of Agnes Foster and the people of frontier-era Florida. In 1886, Agnes is forced to leave the Catholic orphanage in New York where she grew up to start a new life as a teacher in Persimmon Hollow, a small Florida town she has seen only in a newspaper ad. With nothing but her strong Catholic faith to sustain her, she leaves behind the only home she’s ever known and the little girl she hopes to adopt, and encounters a wild and beautiful new landscape, and a town full of hardworking, faith-filled people. She also meets the difficult, yet handsome and hard-to-ignore Seth Taylor, a man whose heart has been hardened to God after a terrible loss. Just as Agnes starts to feel Persimmon Hollow could be a good home for her and her daughter, and that Seth could be her love, tragedy strikes in the form of a trio of evil men from both their pasts, intent on doing them more harm. Will their fragile new love survive? Will Seth return to his faith? Can Agnes finally escape her dark past and find a bright future?
