The state of Iowa was still young and wild when Wayne Lockwood came to it from New England in 1851. He claimed a quarter-section about a hundred miles west of Dubuque and quickly came to appreciate widely scattered neighbors like Jeremiah Martin, whose seven daughters would have chased the gloom from any bachelor's heart. Sabina, Emily, Celia, Melinda, Phoebe Lou, Jeanie, and Suzanne are timeless in their appeal - too spirited to be preoccupied with sermons, sickness, and sudden death. However, the feasts, weddings, and holiday celebrations in Song of Years are shadowed by all the rigors and perils of frontier living, which captures the period in Iowa of Indian scares and county-seat wars, as well as the climate preceding the Civil War.

It reaches white heat just as he starts for a class reunion which the hated rival is to attend MRS. HENRY Y. MASON'S years numbered fifty-two, which means that she stood on that plateau of life where one looks both hopefully forward and longingly back. Life had been very gracious to Mother Mason. It had brought her health, happiness, and Henry; and sometimes in a spasm of loyal devotion, Mother decided that the greatest of these was Henry. To-night, as she sat knitting by the library table, her heavy figure erect, her plump face, under its graying hair, radiating energy and kindliness, her health was evident.

When Linnie Colsworth comes from the East to visit relatives in Omaha, she is plunged into a wider, more hazardous world than she had ever known. In the wake of the Civil War, land seekers are pouring into the West and displacing the Indian tribes. Not interested in spending her days sewing and serving tea, Linnie travels up the Missouri to deliver a "Dear John" message to her cousin's fiancé, a handsome lieutenant - and suddenly becomes the wife of this stranger. They come to love and trust each other, but can they survive this raw frontier? Their harrowing story is based on the diary of a frontier wife.

At the age of seventeen, Abbie must decide whether to marry Ed, and live a life of comfort, or Will, who offers a sod shanty on the Nebraska frontier.

Ella Bishop came to college a healthy, country-bred girl, alive to every fresh sensation, with an infinite capacity for work, love, and understanding. Her abundant energy and devotion to learning made her a superior student, then a gifted teacher. But her smile concealed more than one youthful tragedy, and tragedy did not stop with youth.