It is the true story of Anna Ingevich and two other immigrants as they pursue their ambitions in America, finding love, losing it, and rediscovering it as their lives intersect and they form connections of unshakable faith, love, and respect.
Honoring Anna: Writing Journey
Honoring Anna started as a history project to honor my wife Marlene (Molly) forty years after the death of her grandma Anna. I had met and known Anna prior to her death and admired her greatly, but I had no notion at the time of the intricacy and depth of her life.
As I peeled back the layers of Anna’s life through interviews with her daughter Marjorie, her sons Obert and Arthur, as well as relatives and friends from South Dakota to New York to Norway, the family history I had anticipated being brief became complex and intriguing. It became so compelling that I just couldn’t get it out of my mind! Anna’s journey was fascinating, but the faith, love, and honor displayed by her and her fellow immigrants drew me so profoundly and unexpectedly into their lives that I felt compelled to memorialize their history and hold them up as examples for all of us to emulate.
As I wrote this book, my primary purpose was to do justice to Anna and her fellow immigrants’ profound faith, love, and honor. I had never aspired to be a writer, but their story was remarkable, and I knew it would die with our generation if I didn’t tell it. I added dialogue to bring the characters to life and wrote from my heart, doing my best to recreate their history through their eyes and portray them as they truly were—true American heroes who never considered themselves exceptional.
About the Book
Honoring Anna (Book I) and Honoring Anna: The Winds of Time (Book II), two deserving works by Douglas Henry Hoff, are destined to become American classics. They commemorate Anna Ingevich’s life history. She was born on an island in the North Sea, where her mother died when she was eight. When her father remarried a cruel woman with a family of her own, Anna mustered the fortitude to secretly save money to run away from home and board a steamship for America at the age of sixteen.
Anna found her first true love aboard the ship bound for her dream, America, and they were engaged and planned to be married when they arrived in New York. Their hopes and dreams were crushed when they received a telegraph from overseas bearing the most heartbreaking news conceivable. Unforeseen problems, compounded by their honor, forced them to part and Anna found herself fleeing for the second time in her young life, this time from love rather than cruelty.
Anna made new friends as she worked her way across America, sharing her honor, love, and integrity with everyone she encountered. Many of these acquaintances became lifelong friends, and one returned to her life years later to assist in resolving a crisis that threatened to devastate her life.
Anna’s journey through America is chronicled in Honoring Anna (Book I), where she ultimately finds love on a remote homestead. A surprising conclusion binds the three immigrants’ lives together and again exposes their unwavering faith, love, and honor.
Anna experiences the Great Depression, The Year of the Wolves, The Dirty Thirties, and WWII in Book II. Her life on the prairie was fraught with danger and hardships, some of which would try her faith nearly to the breaking point, but you will also share and celebrate her triumphs as she battles wolves, assists in the capture and rescue of a herd of wild mustangs, and is forced to run the ranch by herself for nearly a year after her husband has a life-threatening accident. This one-of-a-kind book series chronicles history through the eyes of the people who created it, as told by the author. Their pages will undoubtedly inspire readers the world over with their stories of unyielding faith, love, and honor.
Please order your copy of these books on Amazon, the website http://honoringanna.com, Barnes and Noble, Nook, or Kindle!