Prayers for Sale

Author(s): Sandra Dallas

Location(s): Colorado

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 1930s

Set in Middle Swan on The Devil’s Backbone, the high ridge where Breckenridge perches in Summit County, Colorado, Prayers for Sale takes place during the mining boom of the late 1930s. Middle Swan, loosely based on the geography and history of Breckenridge, is a gold dredge town, where the gold boats screech and clatter all day long, with silence being a torment rather than a relief because quiet means the dredge has stopped. And the dredge stopping often heralds a grisly death.

Prayers for Sale is stories within a story. The widow Hennie Comfort, an 86-year-old mountain woman, imparts town tales to newcomer Nit Spindle, a young woman who travelled to Colorado from Kentucky to start a life with her new husband. Both women have lost babies, both women hail from the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky, and both women seek companionship in the high altitudes where it can snow any month of the year, and where they never know if the men will come back after a day on the gold dredge.

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