Road to Pleasant Hill
Published in December 2009
It is 1834. Ten-year-old Betsy Johnson is still reeling from the deaths of her parents when she and her younger brother Tad are uprooted from their Eastern Kentucky farm and sent hundreds of miles away to live with the Shakers at Pleasant Hill.
Betsy is frightened by stories that the strange group whirls and twirls wildly in their religious services and that they separate families and take all their possessions. Is this any place for her to grow up?
Right after the stagecoach delivers Betsy and Tad to their new home, the two are torn apart. Betsy is sent with the girls; Tad goes to the boys’ side of the house. The night gets worse when Betsy is blackmailed into keeping a roommate’s secret, one that could be deadly for the whole village.
Step into 1830’s Shaker life with the Johnson children and their new friends to explore the unique aspects of this communal society that worked to create a “heaven on earth.”
- Meet Betsy: After the isolation of mountain life, she finds that having 100 sisters and brothers makes light of any workload and multiplies the fun when it is shared with friends.
- Tad: Shy and sensitive, he is homesick for his parents and lost cabin home.
- Grace: Her artistic talents are trumped only by her ear for gossip — and putting it to good use.
- Ruth: A natural teacher, everyone says, but Betsy teaches her that keeping secrets can kill.
Follow Betsy as she makes new friends – and enemies – and discovers her own gift of healing and arrives at a new meaning of family.
Betsy and Tad's adventures continue through two more books.
In the second book, published in November 2010, Tad takes center stage in a story titled ‘Tis a Gift. After two years with the Shakers, Tad still doesn’t fit in. He tries to do what is expected of boys his age, but everything - from milking cows to baling hay - ends in disaster. He would rather be listening to the music of the wind blowing through tall grasses or watching the dance of a bumblebee. But, that bully Fred just won’t allow it.
The third book in the series will spotlight Grace. It's titled Tree of Life and should be available late in 2011. In it, the spunky, artistic, and clever Grace tries to weave a future for herself outside of the Shaker Village but finds her silken dreams tied up in all kinds of knots that create problems for her and for the whole village.
All three of these books are part of the Think Young collection from MotesBooks. They are available in bookstores and libraries or online directly from MotesBooks, our publisher, or from Amazon.com, or Barnes & Noble.