"Addie Holmes is Apple Creek's resident wallflower. She is kind and giving and has a lot to be grateful for. But she is full of self-doubt because her parents did not want her and gave her to her grandmother to raise. Now her life seems to be just hard work and loneliness. Wary of romance, Addie assumes no man will look beyond her glasses and her tendency to talk to her rescue donkey, Snickers -- until the day she receives a note from a secret admirer....

"A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling. A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade. In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely...