Harrison Quinlan (if not their step-sister Margaret), and school is a welcome distraction.Īt fifteen Carrie enters into a midwifery apprenticeship with her cousin Amelie Savard She attends nursing school as well, because her patients and their children need more than one kind of care. Carrie never learns to like the city, but she and her brother respect their step-father, Dr. Her mother remarries, a well-to-do old family friend, and they settle down in a large house on Waverly Place. With her mother – recently widowed – and her younger brother Nathan she moves to Manhattan. It is the only home she has ever known, but a tragedy makes it impossible to stay. THE SWEET BLUE DISTANCE BackstoryĬarrie Ballentyne is a girl when her life is upended and she must leave Paradise, a small town in the great forests of northern New York State.

It is set primarily in New Mexico Territory in 1857. THE SWEET BLUE DISTANCE is a historical novel to be published by Berkley/Penguin in 2024. Things will be messy for a while, and for that I apologize. While I am doing that, basic information about SWEET BLUE will stay on this page, but everything else will disappear on the long journey to the new url: You probably noticed that the url for this page is /little-birds1857 - but with thee change in title, I have to juggle everything into different urls and spaces. After long and sometimes tense discussion, the title became THE SWEET BLUE DISTANCE. Originally I called this novel LITTLE BIRDS, but my editor and the marketing people just couldn’t live with that. The next novel (already finished and delivered) is a kind of bridge novel that takes place in 1857 - after Wilderness, before Waverly. There IS a third Waverly Place novel forthcoming, but it won’t be the next one published. The Waverly Place novels jump forward to tell the stories of women whose mothers and grandmothers were central to the Wilderness novels. If you know my historical fiction, you’re aware of the Wilderness series (six novels, 1792-1824) and the Waverly Place series (two novels, a third currently in preparation, 1883-85). There is a lot of confusion out there about which novel is coming out next. It has been changed to The Sweet Blue Distance.

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE TITLE WAS Little Birds… The title WAS Little Birds.

Wilderness sara donati