The Friendship Village series best exemplifies Zona Gale's lighter touch with village life. While her Midwestern stories convey an awareness of the foibles of small-town life, they are more celebratory of the sometimes primitive democratic and community-oriented values of small-town life. Always delightful to read.

A Christmas Classic Originally published in 1912. Timeless. It was in October that Mary Chavah burned over the grass of her lawn, and the flame ran free across the place where in Spring her wild flower bed was made. Two weeks later she had there a great patch of purple violets. And all Old Trail Town, which takes account of its neighbours' flowers, of the migratory birds, of eclipses, and the like, came to see the wonder.

In this feminist denunciation of workplace conditions for women in the early 20th, Zona Gale, suffragist, newspaperwoman, and regional writer, reveals the dark side of women's lives on the American Plains. In the midst of all this is Cosma, a young woman learning about romance and the vagaries of life.