Can’t cook but doesn’t bite.” So begins the newspaper ad offering the services of an “A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition” that draws the attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. That unforgettable season deposits the ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big Ditcha gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom.

When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the “several kinds of education”none of them of the textbook varietyMorris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region’s one-room schoolhouse.

FlawlessThe Whistling Season is a book that strives for more than beauty, which it achieves, it reaches for joy.O, the Oprah Magazine