Bøger af Steven Reak

The setting is picturesque Lexington. A small, quiet, rural community in the upper Midwest, surrounded by a lake, a quaint church, two old lakeside bars and an old lively dance hall. It is the home of Betty, Edward, their families and friends. Where everyone is trying to make things better for each other and a life for themselves. Based on true story. Follow their lives in the simpler times of the 1940's and throughout the coming of age 1960's, and spend time with them at the old dance hall going to dances with Lily, a promiscuous neighbor, and Jigger, a family friend who lives in a camper alongside the dance hall. Meet Edward and Betty's parents, who are completely different from one another, their many brothers and sister's, their eccentric neighbors Roman and Edna, plus many more entertaining people and characters. Share their lives when Edward receives his draft notice for World War II, a mysterious drowning occurs, and see what happens when a group of wild gypsies ride through their small community. With their ever growing family, Edward and Betty, who's pregnant again, and with no where else to go after a house fire, move in with Edward's parents. After spending a terribly long winter with them, Edward and Betty buy an eighty-acre farm through the GI Bill, with an old two-story farm house with no running water and a barn. With both fortune and misfortune on their side, the locals tackle life's problems as they most always come along. Relying on help from their family, their neighbors, fellow church members and, of course, their friends at the pavilion bar and dance hall. Come and visit Lexington, you'll like it here. The people are fun, kind, quirky, loving, and honest.

(Anna and Joseph are leaving the large town square where a bloody massacre has just occurred. Her Highness, The Queen has sent her army to quell the peoples' many protests and many men, women and children have died.) "Our neighbors, our countrymen lie dead in the street, while our Queen! our Queen's army! fights us and kills us like butchered animals," Joseph struggles to tell his wife, Anna."We'll go home Joseph! We'll live to fight another day," she tells him, trying to calm him down."Come Joseph. Let's hurry! Please!"The two make their way down the long narrow cobblestone alley way with the sides of many tall buildings on both sides of them."You're limping Joseph," she says, looking at him worriedly."Come, lean on me, but please let's hurry before we run into trouble."Going through back alleys and dark corridors Joseph and Anna make it safely to their home, that is dimly lit with only a few small windows to let in the light.Joseph tells her desperately, crying, "Our Queen Maria Theresa threatens to starve us to keep us docile then charges nearly half of our grain production for her taxes. They kidnap our children to work in their spinning mills making cloth by day and turning them into whores by night. We can't even worship the God of our fathers, Anna.""Hush, Joseph. Not now. We don't need to talk about it any further right now."Suddenly Anna is shaken by a loud pounding on her neighbors door, soon followed by shrieks of terror, as she rushes to the small window to watch to see what's going on."No! No! Bring him back!" Anna's neighbor, a woman, is crouching down on the ground in emotional pain, crying, while a second man is holding her husband, struggling to free to himself."Your family is being declared unfit and your child is being declared an orphan and must come with us." A rough looking man lies, as a third man is roughly forcing the boy with him."Joseph!" Anna whispers. "Three men are taking the neighbor boy, claiming Karolina and Pavel are unfit to raise him."Joseph sits up in his chair, "We know the neighbors well, Anna. Never before have two more capable mother and father raised children so well," he tells her loudly. "Not in Bohemia alone are the peasants uprisings to be feared," the fifty-eight year old ruling Queen of Austria and Bohemia is writing. "But also in Austria and Moravia. At our very doors, here at home, they create the greatest impudence's. The consequences for themselves and for many innocent people," she means herself and the other European royalty, "are to be feared."She sets the pen from the ink well down on her desk, on top of the letter she has just written, and looks at it and ponders its meaning for the leaders and peoples of the townsNot very tall and plump, the lavishly dressed Queen in a frilly lace dress, with short curly white blonde hair and serious tone rises stately from behind her desk at Schonbrunn Palace in Austria, looking tired from stress and poor health and coughs deeply several times.Her State Chancellor, three members of the High Nobility and three knights, her advisers who make up the Council of State, walk into the room.The opulent space with its high ceiling has stone and marble statues built into nooks in the stone walls along rows of candelabra's for light, with enormous colorful paintings, ornate furnishings and long, fine flowing tapestry. "Sit down," she offers them, after they bow to her."There are many things I want to discuss," she tells them wheezing, slowly walking around the large square table."Among them, the many uprisings in my lands and what we are going to do about them. Particularly the latest misfortune in the town square of Ceske Budejovice, in my beloved Bohemia."