The Practice House by Laura McNeal

Nineteen-year-old Aldine McKenna is stuck at home with her sister and aunt in a Scottish village in 1929 when two Mormon missionaries ring the doorbell. Aldines sister converts and moves to America to marry, and Aldine follows, hoping to find the life shes meant to lead and the person shes meant to love.

In New York, Aldine answers an ad soliciting a teacher for a one-room schoolhouse in a place she cant possibly imagine: drought-stricken Kansas. She arrives as farms on the Great Plains have begun to fail and schools are going bankrupt, unable to pay or house new teachers. With no money and too much pride to turn back, she lives uneasily with the family of Ansel Pricethe charming, optimistic man who placed the adand his family responds to her with kind curiosity, suspicion, and, most dangerously, love. Just as shes settling into her strange new life, a storm forces unspoken thoughts to the surface that will forever alter the course of their lives.