Imperfections

Rosemary Elizabeth likes Pleasant Hill. Unlike her former home, the Kentucky Shaker community is serene and full of beautiful things. The food is plentiful and delicious, and she dresses in spotless white garments. Above all, she and her younger siblings are safe there---from their drunken, often violent, father, and from the war between the Union and the Confederacy, which is said to be drawing closer every day.

Perfection is the goal at Pleasant Hill, and Rosemary Elizabeth vows to be perfect so she'll be allowed to stay. As time passes, however, she finds herself more and more at odds with the Shaker path, the rules that are supposed to govern everything she says and does and even what she dreams. If she eliminates all the imperfections the Shakers find in her, will anything remain? Carefully researched, Imperfections takes the reader inside a Shaker community in the 1860s and tells the story of a spirited young woman determined to be herself.