To The Stars Through Difficulties: A Novel

When the paths of three very different women cross in a tiny Kansas town, the trajectory of their lives changes forever. Gayle is still reeling from the devastation wrought by a tornado on her town of Prairie Hill. Angelina is a graduate student who, nearing forty, faces a reckoning with her thesis topic and finds that her dream of securing a PhD has been derailed. And Traci, an outsider artist who lies her way into a position as artist-in-residence at the New Hope cultural center, finds that her lies don’t matter that much–and that she has many gifts to offer the troubled teenagers and the women in the No Guilt Quilters group who rally to her side. As plans for a new cultural center in Prairie Hill grow, the three women find that they’re connected in ways they never expected.

The most compelling aspect of To the Stars is the clear passion Tilghman has for Carnegie libraries and the electric history of how they came to be built in small communities nationwide. Through Angelina, Tilghman weaves in details about the women who rallied together to fund and build fifty-nine Carnegie libraries in Kansas a century ago–a history worth exploring beyond this novel’s pages.