The Sweetheart Season: A Novel

It's 1947 and America has once again made the world safe for democracy. A can-do optimism governs the land - nowhere more so than in America's heartland, the picture-perfect town of Magrit, Minnesota. Headquarters of one of the nation's largest manufacturers of breakfast cereal, Magrit is also home base to the company's mass-circulation magazine, which each week dispenses kitchen wisdom and housewifely advice to millions of women across the country.It is 1947 and a woman's place is once more in the home. But in rural Magrit, the boys who marched off to war don't seem to want to come back to make a home. For Magrit's young women, the future is decidedly uncertain.Until the company founder (and town benefactor) decides to form them into a ball team. What could be better for business than a group of lovely young women wearing the company logo and playing the great American pastime? And if, while on the road, the players should happen to meet up with eligible young men, so much the better.And so the Sweetwheat Sweethearts were born.This is the story of that team.But is it?Told many years after the events by a team member's grown but rebellious daughter, it is a tale of the buoyant forties as reconstructed by a child of the suspicious sixties, a young woman who finds the world of her mother's youth to good to be true: too generous, too innocent, too wedded to happy endings.Who are we to credit, then, for the odd spins and curious twists that surface in her story - the mother, or her doubting daughter? Little by little as the tale is told, Magrit's slow and steady ways come a cropper. Ghosts are seen. Mistrust is sown. And hearts break.