Lost in the Land of Milk and Honey

In 1891, Swedish immigrant Jonas Jönsson sails into the New York harbor with dreams of owning a farm with a red barn, sturdy horses, and a herd of spotted cattle, but the America that stirs his imagination fails to match the promise. The novel explores the paradox, or perhaps the dialectic, of America: alternating shades of noble ideals and ignoble intolerance--the idea of America contrasted with the reality.
With fits and starts, triumphs and tragedies, Jönsson's pursuit of his dreams becomes a complicated journey across the sweep of American history. Turn-of-the-century Minnesota provides the setting, actual events form the backdrop, and real persons weave in and out of Jönsson's fictional story. North-country geography and history provide rich settings. Against the backdrop of a half century of American history-labor strife in lumber, mining, railroading and shipping; the Great War; the Red Scare; the Roaring Twenties; and the Great Depression--Jönsson stumbles along, pursuing his vision of the American dream.
Conflict impedes his journey: class, ethnic, and religious bigotry; fearmongering and scapegoating; and labor violence. The novel shares the critical high-mindedness of Sinclair Lewis with the Minnesota flavor of William Kent Krueger, and nods to the classics of Scandinavian immigrant literature by Ole Rolvaag and Vilhelm Moberg.