In this charming sequel to Papa's Wife, we see Button, second born child to Swedish pastor Franzon and his wife Maria, as she grows up. Her escapades are alternately heartwarming and hilarious, and Mrs. Bjorn (the real Button) tells her family's story in a wonderful combination of realism and imagination.
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Blue-eyed, a dreamer, a troublemaker, Button Franzon was never out of mischief as a child, almost never out of love as a young girl. Finally, long after she really fell in love and married, when she was wife and mother, cook and homemaker, she found the secret of self-realization.
The story of Papa's Daughter opens in Swedish Lapland, the northernmost province of Sweden, five years after the turn of the century. In Pastor Franzon's household, the second child, Charlotta Maria (nicknamed Button), was "A Sinner." Led into mistakes by a too-fertile imagination, she collected swear words, she stole, she lied. She put a head of cabbage on her pillow and sneaked out at night to meet her boyfriend. Then the Franzon family moved to America where things were different. Button met and married Eric Bjork.
This is the warm, romantic story of a child in Swedish Lapland who had a dream and of a woman in the United States who dared to follow that dream through both joy and a dramatic, guilt-ridden sorrow to its fulfillment.
Thyra Ferre Bjorn herself was born in a small village in Swedish Lapland. Like the Franzon family, there were four sisters and four brothers and their father was the pastor of the local church. She came to America with her family in 1924. She is married to Robert J. Bjorn, also a native of Sweden, and has two daughters and four grandchildren.
Mrs. Bjorn has wanted to write ever since she read, as a little girl in school, about the great Swedish writer, Fredrika Bremer, and almost as soon as she could spell she wrote poems and stories. Several of the latter were published in the Swedish-American magazine, Kvinnan och Hemmet, but the arrival of her children forced her to put aside writing ambitions until the present. Mrs. Bjorn is also a frequent lecturer at clubs and church groups. Her home is Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
Jacket design by Pat Feder
—from the dust jacket
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