The Practice House by Laura McNeal: book review

The Practice House (2017) is set in Ayr, a Scottish village, in 1929, moves to Kansas in America, and ends in California in 1957.

In Ayr, Scotland, sisters Aldine and Eileen McKenna live with their aunt, Charity Sedgewick McKenna – whom they call Aunt Sedge. Three Mormon men, Elder Cooper, Elder Forehead, and Elder Lance, knock on the door, preaching their religion – the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints – and Salt Lake City in the land of America.

Eileen converts and leaves Scotland to marry Elder William Cooper. When she arrives in America, she writes to her sister Aldine, asking her to join them. Aldine does – and takes up a teaching job in a one-room school, Stony Bank’s country school, in the Great Plains of Dorland, Kansas – two thousand miles from her sister.

She lives with Ansel Price, his wife Eleanour (Ellie), and their three children: Charlotte, Clarence, and Geneva (Neva). The story drifts through the Depression years of the 1930s, drought, illnesses and deaths, and from one hardship to another.

The title of the book comes from the daughter Charlotte. An influential older man, Mr McNamara, falls in love with Charlotte in California, and secures a job for her as a teacher in a Practice House – a classroom for home economics where high school girls learn to cook, sew, and keep house.

It’s a long depressing story. The pace of the story picks up when Ellie Price inherits a restaurant in California. Tensions begin between Ellie, who thinks Califorinia is an exciting paradise (away from the broken dreams of Dorland), and her husband who pines for the farm back in Kansas (away from the shallow life of California).

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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