Emmi: A novel

Emily Reese, an eleven-year-old girl who has trouble reading, trouble with numbers, trouble with school, trouble with friends, who is only happy when she is alone in a special wild place that she considers her own. Wade McPherson, an eighty-eight-year-old retired English professor whose life now revolves around a prairie he has restored and a woodland he likes to believe is his own. Frank Reese, a single father who adores his daughter above all things and blames himself for the death of her mother in a car crash on an icy Chicago freeway. Angelina Valenzuela, a young Mexican woman fleeing south Texas and a past she is not proud of who has come north to try and bring life to a shrunken heart. In a small rural town in a southern Iowa county on the border of the Skunk River State Forest the largest and last remnant of wilderness in the state, these four enter into a battle against corporate greed, political ambition, and maniacal trophy addiction to save this wild place and a magnificent snow-white stag that is rumored to live there. Three murders bring a slew of other crazy characters into the fray as they fight to save these priceless remains of a time past.