A Wind of Many Colors
The KC Community News has an article about an historical novel written by a Leawood man, John H. Brown.
The novel, A Wind of Many Colors, is the only book ever to be endorsed by the docents of Historic Oxford Schoolhouse in Leawood.
The novel takes place in 1859 and 1860 in the Missouri Ozarks, Colorado mining towns, Kentucky’s Cumberland Pass and a Louisiana plantation. Almost halfway through the novel readers are introduced to the City of Kansas.
Among the characters to find refuge in the frontier town called the City of Kansas, are a Spanish-Italian plantation woman, a wealthy French woman, an Irish immigrant, a former slave, and the wife of the central character, because there’s all sorts of kidnapping going on amidst a background of slavery, and KC, or CK as it was, is the perfect place for such a mixed bag to take a break from the evils of the surrounding Midwest.
The article says that 100,000 copies of this first book by Brown have been sold through a local publisher - which is an astonishing number so not surprisingly Brown is reported as talking to larger publishers about wider distribution and there’s also talk of a movie.
So maybe you won’t have to read the book to see if the Irish immigrant is the real deal and just like your ancestors.
The book is on the recommended reading list of several Midwestern schools, though I don’t know if it’s for its history or for reasons of literature.
But you can decide for yourself by buying A Wind of Many Colors from Amazon, and if you do I’ll make about a quarter.
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