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A Sister for Jennifer

by Laurel M. Evans

506 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-1487; ISBN 1-4120-9731-2; US$30.28, C$34.82, EUR23.61, £15.65

A year in the life of a Northwest Missouri farm family, including their efforts to rehabilitate and retain custody of an abused child.

About the Book

A Sister for Jennifer is the story of a young farm family. The locale is Northwest Missouri and the time interval is a year in the early nineteen seventies. While it is a fictionalized narrative, it is based on events that could have happened, and many of the anecdotes are taken from life. A few of the characters are loose portrayals of real people. The old farm couple is based on the authors parents-in-law, and the minister of the country church on the authors husband. The crippled girl is roughly based on a real girl known to the author, who, along with her parents, have departed this life. All the other characters in the story are inventions of the authors imagination to create the fabric of the story. The towns depicted are composiites of several small and medium sized towns in the area, but the real names of the larger cities are used to identify the general locality of the story

Along with the family's struggles to rehabilitate and gain permanent custody of an abused child, the day to day life of farm people, how they work and how they play, is described. They are honest hardworking people who believe strongly in Christian precepts and the American work ethic. Their experiences are somewhat idealized, as the author dwells primarily on the positive aspects of their lives, but feel this is an accurate characterization of many people she knows.

About the Author

Laurel Marie (Hastings) Evans was born Christmas night, 1927 in Snyder, Colorado, the eleventh child in a family of 12 children. When she was a teenager she moved with her family to a farm near Stanberry, a small town in Northwestern Missouri, where she finished school, went to college and taught at one room country schools for five and half years.

On October 24, 1947 Laurel and Russell Evans, a veteran of World War II were married. Russell was a farmer when they married, but subsequently became a full time iminster to a succession of open country and small town churches in the area. Thet raised two sons, one their child by birth, and the other by adoption, each equally loved. Both sons are successful adults, married, and the daddies to the couple's five grandchildren.

As senior citizens, Russell still pastor's three churches, and Laurel and he keep busty with church activities and with many tasks around their home on the smalll farm they bought soon after they were married, and where they continue to live because they love country life.

Laurel loves to garden, sew, and write. A Sister for Jennifer was written over thirty years ago , but when Laurel met with rejections in her attempt to have it published she gave up the efforts until she saw the Trafford ad about publishing on demand.