The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik

Regal House Titles
$19.95 - $29.95
Current Stock:
0
SKU:
RVB25

Expected release date is 28th Oct 2025

At thirty years old and unmarried, Vesta Blonik’s future looks bleak when her widowed father remarries, sells the family farm, and moves away during the depths of the Great Depression, leaving her behind. With winter approaching, she seeks shelter with her brother Josef and his wife, Eva, in a nearby town. The two women start a laundry business to make ends meet, but when Eva announces she’s expecting a baby, Vesta realizes she must forge her own path.
Meanwhile, in eastern North Carolina, Gordon Crenshaw is engulfed in despair after losing his wife and newborn during childbirth. Concerned for his well-being, his family commits him to Dix Hill, the state mental hospital. Struggling against his grief, Gordon’s disruptive behavior leads his family to seek his release, but they learn he can only be discharged if a suitable caretaker is found. Through connections in the Carolinas and Minnesota, the Crenshaws find Vesta and pose as Gordon, and her suitor, through letters that hide the truth of his situation. When Vesta agrees to marry Gordon, unaware of the deception, she travels south, only to learn the full extent of the Crenshaws’ lie after the wedding.
Bound by necessity and circumstance, Vesta and Gordon must navigate their new life amid the tobacco fields of North Carolina, confronting their pasts and discovering the possibility of love in unexpected places.

Praise for The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik

“An exquisite, utterly absorbing story of a farmgirl in Minnesota during the Great Depression struggling alone in a farmhouse of patched lumber and tin walls, a dying stove and smothering snow leaning against the door. Her mother is dead, her father has abandoned her, and she waits for visits from her brother and the grumpy mailman. Taking a wild chance on a quirky letter from a stranger far away who wants a wife, Vesta gambles everything and with all her possessions in an old trunk, takes a train to the South. But who has written her and is he who he says he is? Suppose he is not?
It is rare I find a novel so compellingly painted of a whole other America nearly a hundred years ago: a world where a few dollars in a tattered envelope mean enough for food and bed to sleep in and the land can hardly grow wheat. I lived every page through the resourceful Vesta, utterly absorbed as she struggles to make a life for herself, unable to put the book down. Wonderfully done, so rich and real.”

—Stephanie Cowell, author of The Man in the Stone Cottage: a novel of the Brontë Sisters, Claude and Camille and The Boy in the Rain, American Book award recipient

“As an author of three historical novels, it is a privilege to recommend The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik by Denise Cline. This book accomplishes the two main things a historical novel should deliver: It tells a gripping story, and it educates. While this story of an arranged marriage set in 1937 is filled with tragedy and its characters are often motivated by desperation, The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik is also filled with hope. Vesta and Gordon Crenshaw have never met and the odds in making this marriage work are slim. Both characters, too, have been lied to and deceived by the Crenshaw family. Yet, the reader finds herself rooting for the couple. We invest equally in each side of the story because Denise Cline skillfully and deftly makes us see how well Vesta and Gordon could serve each other, and we want each of them to be in better circumstances. We want each of them to love the other. And in the end, we believe they will find that path. Hopeful stories are rare these days. We do not need saccharine stories, or excessively sentimental stories. We need gritty stories of people who struggle and end up in better places, with better people than they started with. The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik is ultimately a love story, and this wounded world deserves its message of hope.”

—Nancy Peacock, author of Life Without Water

“As cold seeps through cracks in her shanty, thirty-year-old Vesta Blonik, left behind by Pa for his new family, knows no matter how hard she works and scrimps, the impending Minnesota winter on the hardscrabble farm could kill her. Options for an unmarried woman are scarce, especially with the Depression crippling the country. Milking Lottie the cow—her only confidant—Vesta bares her soul in language reminiscent of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong: simple, honest, and heartfelt. Readers will smell the rich hay and feel heat from the soft animal flank. Down south, Gordon Crenshaw is involuntarily committed to Dix Hill Mental Hospital when his grief over the death of his wife is misconstrued. When a new-fangled treatment for his condition threatens his future, Gordon’s misguided family concoct a plan to save him that lands, in the form of a letter full of half-truths and hope, in Vesta’s chapped hands. Denise Cline’s prose is that of a seasoned storyteller. Readers will root for Vesta and when they finish The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik, will eagerly anticipate Cline’s next novel.”

—Sara E. Johnson, author of the Alexa Glock forensics mysteries NYTs Readers’ Picks: Molten Mud Murder

The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik by Denise Cline is a lovely, unputdownable novel of resilience in the face of unimaginable hardship. Set during the Depression Era, it’s the story of two strong-hearted people, bent but not broken by poverty and loss. Vesta Blonik is a thirty-year-old farmer, never married, who lives with her bullying father on a hardscrabble Minnesota plot. Used to hard work and her father’s belittling scolds, she is nevertheless blind-sided when he sells the land and abandons her to a future that looks more and more desperate. Vesta struggles against hopelessness, until she begins receiving letters from a stranger in North Carolina, Gordon Crenshaw, through the machinations of well-intentioned clergymen and Gordon’s not-so-well-intentioned family. It seems Gordon is looking for a wife... Beautifully written and emotionally compelling, this novel will have readers impressed by Vesta’s leap of faith and by the healing power of simple compassion.”

—Susan Coventry, author of The Queen’s Daughter and Till Taught by Pain

“A sweeping Depression-era tale of an arranged marriage between plain, practical Vesta Blonik, who holds down her father’s Minnesota farm, and the acutely bereaved widower Gordon Crenshaw, a patient in a North Carolina mental institution. From the hardships and austerity of farm life in Minnesota, to the idiosyncrasies and duplicity of the Crenshaw family in North Carolina, The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik is a story of hard choices, of displacement and belonging, of love and the ties that bind. Denise Cline is an adept, skillful storyteller.”

—Ann Parrent

“Denise Cline hits all the right notes in this Depression era story about a resilient young woman and a grief-stricken widower out of options, except one: marrying a complete stranger. This is a slow-burn love story for practical people with complex characters you can’t help but root for, and plot twists that keep the pages turning.”

—Laura Williams