At Home in Persimmon Hollow

At Home in Persimmon Hollow is a novel by the American writer Gerri Bauer, published in 2015 by Franciscan Media. It is the first book in a series about the town and its inhabitants.

Agnes Foster has spent her life in a Catholic orphanage in New York, and at the start of the novel she is sent out to support herself. The position she takes is in a small town in Florida that is still being settled, and she finds a place with the rough edges of a frontier community: a store, a church, neighbours who are interested in her business, and a population made up of people who have come from somewhere else for their own reasons. The novel follows her first months as a teacher and her life in the town, and it is written for readers who want the faith of the main character to be part of the story rather than a detail. Bauer wrote further books about Persimmon Hollow, and the series is set in the same period and place.

The book is published by a Catholic press, and its historical setting is a Florida town at the end of the nineteenth century rather than the frontier of the western states.