I have been busy revising
Rebekka's Heart, the first book in the
Kentucky Cousins series. My protagonist, Rebekka Yoder, has a lot to be thankful for: a debt-free spacious farm with dotted daisies and lots of animal companionship. The Prayer Rock area, just above the splendid patch of daisies overlooking Ripple Creek, is a place she hasn't spent much time at because,well, she just never thought about it. And she was too busy trying to live down her "The Red-Head" and "Big Green Tractor Accident Girl", titles since a mischievous May day, when she was supposed to be in the strawberry field.
One snow-covered winter night a broken-hearted teenager decides to drink a fifth of bourbon and take his own life around Bender's Curve, crossing paths with Rebekka's grandfather Levi and his friend Brother Melvin. Facing the sorrow of loss and a new move to run her grandfather's orphanage, gift shop, buffet restaurant and bakery, she learns that even the rural shut-ins and young school girls know The Big Green Tractor Accident. Feeling defeated, she manages Treasures, the gift shop, and cruises around Crab Orchard in an oversized Suburban with sidekick Martina Garcia, an Hispanic all-star basketball guard and who has an IQ of 140, dreaming to save the world and planting daisies in the fast-food and beer-bottle-littered fields along the roadside.
However, Martina has taken a change for the worse, being hooked on Oxycontins and grows distant form her. Back pedaling her bike and packing for her upcoming Florida holiday, she yearns to escape. Their new driver, who looks suspicious and doesn't fit in, tells his friend that he has six weeks to live, and Rebekka had overheard the conversation. Feeling empathetic, she doesn't tell her parents, and it costs her sister's life as the driver dies behind the wheel and runs off Interstate 75 in Georgia. Feeling sorry for her sister's death, she runs away to the arms of her more liberal Mennonite aunt in Indiana, who is planning a mission trip to Paraguay, where Rebekka's intriguing pen pal friend is from and whom she'd dreamed of meeting. However, he's not in Paraguay anymore, he is in Chicago, Rebekka's preferred meeting point. And trouble is brewing in Paraguay, and only a person with courage, faith in the unseen-called belief, and am imperfectness-one who has fallen, then fallen again, and that believes in the planting of daisies can overcome.
And sometimes it is those things and people that you take for granted ,on a daily basis, that have been sent to save you. And one day that one person would step out of their everyday role and jump in the line of fire, losing their own life to save you. And then one day, the daisies, planting during a storm, would sprout up and save a city, a Detroit man and an entire community. For He that creates the hills also creates the valleys, and He who creates happiness also allows the storms. And He also sends the daisies.
I hope you cruise over to your local Wal-Mart or Barnes & Noble store to preorder the book this summer!
"
For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believith in Him shall not persih but have everlasting life. " John 3:16
Blessings,
Sicily Yoder
