Rose - a precocious young girl in 1930s Wisconsin - runs away from home to avoid going onto high school and what she sees as a certain path to marriage and motherhood. What she seeks is adventure. What she finds is much more. ---------- Rose is thrown into the lives of the varied people and towns of the Mississippi while working on river boats, going to a prep school in St. Louis where she lives with a black family in the Ville, and working in a bordello in New Orleans (not as a call girl, of course. She is a Catholic girl from the Midwest after all). What she doesn't anticipate are the...

Shell shock, battle fatigue, post traumatic stress disorder it all means the same thing to veterans who have served their country by putting themselves in harm's way. But for women veterans of WWII like Rose Krantz, it also meant coming back to a country that, even during the war, hadn't given them the rights that the lowest-ranking male soldier enjoyed, barely acknowledged the sacrifices they had all made, and, in some cases, chastised them for even participating.

So in 1945, when Rose came home to bury her husband only to find out she was pregnant with his child, her nightmares,...