Silver Dollar Girls

Within a farming valley in the Catskill Mountains are challenges, tragedy, and a decades-old family secret...24-year-old Mae McCain flees from New York City at the beginning of the COVID lockdown to her great-grandparents' abandoned farmhouse in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York, where she learns to survive on her own. Mae befriends six-year-old Wesley who lives nearby with his father. Through their experiences with nature and life in the rural valley, Mae and Wesley create a lasting bond. Unknown to Mae, Wesley has his own secrets. He believes that COVID is a monster living in his valley and that he alone must defend his father and new friend Mae from the danger it presents. In the attic of the old house, Mae discovers a box that contains papers describing how her great-grandmother Ruth became a pilot at a young age and then joined the prestigious Women Airforce Service Pilots. She, with over a thousand other women, contributed to the WWII war effort by ferrying aircraft from factories to airfields. Ruth's aviation history was kept quiet for decades. Mae gradually learns why the secret was never revealed. During the COVID lockdown, Mae discovers that she is pregnant. Afraid to go to a doctor's office or hospital because of the pandemic, she must figure out how to manage both the pregnancy and birth and eventually turns to the wife of a farmer to assist in a home birth. Throughout the book, chapters of Wesley and Ruth are interspersed with Mae's. Ruth's real daughter, Margaret DiBenedetto, has written many of her mothers' flight experiences into this fictional account about heritage and women of strength. Using occurrences from her own youth on her family's dairy farm, along with valley lore, DiBenedetto weaves a realistic tale of life in a rural farming town--the friendships, hardships and rewards.