The Road Home — Tommy Tenney; Mark Andrew Olsen

For Las Vegas widow Naomi, memories of a Pennsylvania Dutch childhood are an ache from the distant past, a painful memory of abandoned roots and lost connections. She has long since reconciled herself to the shattered dream of what had once enticed her from her heritage--a tiny apartment thick with loneliness and regret, the sad lives of her two sons, and her sole consolation: the friendship with daughter-in-law Ruth. But when hard living claims both of Naomi's boys, she and Ruth turn Naomi's creaky Impala eastward in a desperate last-chance bid for hope and meaning. Thus begins an adventure: a cross-country odyssey that brings Naomi home to her old farm in Lancaster County--and to the values and rhythms of a life once spurned. Although never having seen the East before, Ruth finds a home here too, among the slow and authentic cadences of Pennsylvania farm country. Can two women from different backgrounds and generations, overwhelmed with life and loss, find healing for wounds once thought too deep to heal? Does life offer any real second choices and chances? Can modern paths, after leaving all that was good and true, ever truly lead home?