Overview

It's a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt--daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol--fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent despite her youth. She's also accustomed to defying convention. Against her father's wishes, she married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt--builder of the New Orleans--and spent her honeymoon on a primitive flatboat. But the stakes for this trip are infinitely higher. If Nicholas's untried steamboat reaches New Orleans, it will serve as a profitable packet ship between that city and Natchez, proving the power of steam as it travels up and down the Mississippi. Success in this venture would revolutionize travel and trade, open the west to expansion, and secure the Roosevelts' future. Lydia believes herself ready for all the dangers ahead--growing unrest among native people, disease or injury, and the turbulent Falls of the Ohio, a sixty-foot drop long believed impassable in such a large boat. But there are other challenges in store, impossible to predict as Lydia boards that fall day. Challenges which--if survived--will haunt and transform her, as surely as the journey will alter the course of a nation . . .

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Diane C. McPhail is an artist, a minister, and the acclaimed author of Follow the Stars Home, The Abolitionist's Daughter, and The Seamstress of New Orleans, which was a finalist for the Thomas Wolf Fiction Award and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award. A graduate of Ole Miss, Duke Writers, University of Iowa Distance, and the Yale Writers' Conference, she is a member of NC Writers Network and the Historical Novel Society. She was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, only miles from the Mississippi River and now lives in Highlands, North Carolina, with her husband and dog. Jessica Marchbank is a classically trained vocalist based in Bloomington, Indiana. She spends her days working for a national reproductive justice nonprofit organization, and her nights in her professional home studio bringing stories to life with her clear, warm voice and energetic spirit. Jessica has an unbridled enthusiasm for long hours at the microphone and a fanatical attention to detail which she brings to every project.

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