The Promise of Dawn

Starred review from July 1, 2017
Lured by his uncle Einar's promise of five acres in exchange for clearing his land of trees, Rune moves his pregnant wife, Signe, and their three sons from Norway to Minnesota. But after a long, difficult journey, Rune and Signe find a neglected, filthy, rundown farm, not at all what they'd expected. Worse yet, Uncle Einar is a brutal, hardened bully and taskmaster. Aunt Gerd, just about as bad in temperament as her husband, is ill, confined to a filthy bed. Rune's family is treated like slaves, forced to work under subhuman conditions. Things look hopeless as Einar refuses to release them from servitude, even after they've fulfilled the terms of their contract. Their prospects appear more and more bleak as time goes on, but Signe does her best to keep her faith. Snelling examines many aspects of family life, both warm and loving and poisonously dysfunctional, as she captures the fine details of life on a farm as well as the plight of the immigrant in 1909. This is the first book in Snelling's Under Northern Skies series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)