Heart and Spark

They built a machine with no conscience and no fear and gave it control of the power grid. What could go wrong?Emily Paulini came home to her parents' farmette in Indiana County, Pennsylvania with a master's thesis nobody would let her keep and a warning nobody wanted to hear: the power grid is run by a machine with a mind of its own, and it is going to fail.At the farmers' seminar, they broke for lunch before she could speak. Three people stayed in their seats-cattle rancher Regis Berg, his guarded foster son Sam, and Peach, the warm-hearted baker quietly in love with a man twice her age-and three spectators turned out to be enough for Emily to make her point.Welcome to Longdale Valley, where life moves at the pace of seasons, secrets travel faster than gossip, and the megachurch on the hill has been called the temple of Latter-day Sinners by every local with an opinion. A former stripper finds her calling in a Sunday sermon. A widow risks her best friendship for a shot at love. A pastor prays for help and gets exactly what he asked for. And when the lights finally go out, the Bergs and their neighbors discover what they're truly made of, who they were always meant to choose for companionship, and how funny and fragile modern life had been all along.Heart and Spark is a big-hearted novel of rural America on the cusp of losing everything that powers it and finding what it never needed to be plugged in to begin with.