On a Minnesota farm in the mid 1800's, the hard working members of the Larson family find time to celebrate Kirsten's tenth birthday.

Springtime brings a new barn and a tiny baby to the Larsons's farm. It brings worries and more work for Kirsten, too. American Girls Collection/Kirsten #4.

On a Minnesota farm in the mid 1800's, the hard working members of the Larson family find time to celebrate Kirsten's tenth birthday

Josefina hopes to become a "curandera" or healer like Tâia Magdalena, and she is tested just before her tenth birthday when a friend receives a potentially fatal snakebite.

A tough Minnesota winter brings many changes to Kirsten's frontier life, including the new responsibility of helping her brother Lars set his traps and a move into a new house for her family.

At thirty-one, Kirsten has just returned to San Francisco from a bohemian year in Rome, ready to pursue a serious career as a writer and eventually, she hopes, marriage and family. When she meets Steve Beckwith, a handsome and successful attorney, she begins to see that future materialize more quickly than she’d dared to expect. Twenty-two years later, Steve has turned into someone quite different. Unemployed and addicted to opioids, he uses money and their two children to emotionally blackmail Kirsten. What’s more, he’s been having an affair with their real estate agent, who is also her close friend. So she divorces him—but after their divorce is finalized, Steve is diagnosed with colon cancer and dies within a year, leaving Kirsten with $1.5 million in debts she knew nothing about. It’s then that she finally understands: The man she’d married was a needy, addictive person who came wrapped in a shiny package. As she fights toward recovery, Kirsten begins to receive communications from Steve in the afterlife—which lead her on an unexpected path to forgiveness. The Ghost Marriage is her story of discovery—that life isn’t limited to the tangible reality we experience on this earth, and that our worst adversaries can become our greatest teachers.