Gretchen Moran Laskas: 2 books

Perhaps there is always a mark, when another person touches you, an invisible thread connecting you to them. Backbreaking work, threadbare clothes, and black coal dust choking the air -- this is what a miner's daughter knows. Willa Lowell fears that this dust marks her to be nothing else, that...

“I come from a long line of midwives,” narrates Elizabeth Whitely. “I was expected to follow Mama, follow Granny, follow Great-granny. In the end, I didn’t disappoint them. Or perhaps I did. After all, there were no more midwives after me.”For generations, the women in Elizabeth’s...