num_pages: 208
description: Mary Stoltzfus is thirty years old splashed with freckles and unmarried. In her Amish world that qualifies her to be called an old maid. She is living her quiet schoolteacher life in the Lancaster County Amish community when she gets a surprising invitation in the mail one day. Would she come to Montana to teach?Of course not she decides fully at home in eastern Pennsylvania where she can go out to eat in dozens of restaurants do her laundry in a newfangled washer thats powered by compressed air and hire a driver if she wants to go farther than her horse and buggy can comfortably take her. What is there to do in Montana she sniffs.But soon she becomes annoyed by the cracks in the floor of her one-room schoolhouse the noise of the nearby road and the two eighth-grade boys who try to make toilet paper cigarettes and nearly burn down the privy.Before long Mary is on Amtrak just to take care of her curiosity she explains to her mother. She arrives at a desolate station and meets Arthur Bontrager who had signed the invitation and has come to introduce her to Beaver Creek School dirt roads and the fancy shed where she would live. When she settles into this world of mountain ranges and pine-tree majesty her old buried questionsabout why no man had ever been her matchhave come along to live with her. After shes injured by wild dogs on her walk home from school Mary faces new questions. Is she weak if she accepts a Bouvier des Flandres dog from Arthurs friend? Who is the young woman in the photo at Arthurs house? And why does she suddenly care? Does she really belong back in Lancaster?Skyhorse Publishing as well as our Arcade Yucca and Good Books imprints are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fictionnovels novellas political and medical thrillers comedy satire historical fiction romance erotic and love stories mystery classic literature folklore and mythology literary classics including Shakespeare Dumas Wilde Cather and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
language: English
title: Mary's Christmas Goodbye
publisher: Good Books