Calla has one plan—college, and a life far from this house—until the money meant to get her there disappears.

Washington State, 1964. Sixteen-year-old Calla Smith, the oldest of five, is done waiting for her father to notice what her stepmother has turned their home into. She's worked and raised her younger siblings since before she was old enough to hold a broom, counting down the years until she's gone for good. When the money set aside for her future is quietly shifted to her younger brothers, so is her only way out.

Fifteen years earlier, in South Dakota, a grieving young widower named John Smith remarried, certain it would save his family. It didn't. And by the time John understands what's happening inside his own home, the damage has already reached his children.

A Man Called Smith moves between Calla's account of the years she survived and John's account of the years he let slip past him—two versions of the same family, standing on opposite sides of the silence. It's a story about what a father's inaction costs a daughter, and what a woman raised to expect nothing can still build for herself.

This book is for you if:

You want a family saga that spans decades.

You're listening for the daughter who survives it, not the father who almost destroys it.

You enjoy endings that are honest and relatable rather than easy.

A Man Called Smith is a women's historical fiction novel and the third book in the Smith Family Saga—though, like its predecessors, it stands complete on its own.