Across a Broken Shore

Following your true calling has never been easy.

It’s 1936 and teenaged Willa, the only daughter in a Catholic family with four brothers, wants to become a physician.  But money is tight. The family’s saloon barely scrapes by, and two of her brothers have been unable to get jobs working on the new Golden Gate Bridge. Even worse, most of Willa’s family believes that her future is already set in stone. They expect her to enter a religious order and become a nun, thereby bringing honor to their close-knit clan. But Willa has no intention of settling into this prepackaged destiny, at least not without a fight, and when she meets a pioneering female physician, Willa becomes the doctor’s assistant – a fact she keeps hidden from her whole family (except for her sympathetic youngest brother).

This book has a strong sense of time and place, portraying a Depression-era San Francisco with its itinerant construction laborers, ethnic neighborhoods, and hard-luck Hoovervilles. For readers who like romance, a relationship develops between Willa and one of the bridge workers that moves beyond friendship. But not everything in this book ends happily.

For fans of 20th century historical fiction who want a break from reading about war.