Set on the Nebraska Plains in 1953, "The Round Prairie Wars" is an initiation story told from the viewpoint of Jeb Wilder, a nine-year-old girl whose family lives in a small trailer house and moves every year because of her father's government job. Her mother is schizophrenic, dragging Jeb into a world of shifting realities, vivid hallucinations, poetry, and word games. Her mother's paranoia directly parallels the free-floating hysteria of the Red Scare. Jeb is funny and serious, a liar and a truth-teller, and above all a fighter who must learn how to survive as the perennial outsider. She faces bullies twice her size and adults with half her courage. She and her brother Sam construct their own protective fictions, including the fort they dig to fight dangerous enemies and the magic formula they create to defend their mother from the brutal fate of the mentally ill in the 1950s. Jeb's father fixes what he can, usually a machine; Sam secretly works on pipe bombs under the aegis of Boy Scout merit badges; and her mother progressively loses contact with everyday reality. Meanwhile, Round Prairie inexorably moves toward a horrendous incident disguising small-town bigotry as a purge to keep society safe and protect its treasured ideologies. With the help of a few unlikely friends, Jeb manages to build a life from the rubble with whatever pieces she can find, however broken and random, but uniquely hers. •5 Star Review, "Best Book," Chanticleer Book Reviews: "In The Round Prairie Wars, Aden Ross turns these small, familiar struggles into something much larger―a portrait of a childhood shaped by the echoes of distant conflicts." •Kirkus Reviews: "The year is 1953: The Korean War has ended, and the Soviet Union has successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb. Jeb makes for a delightful main character as she tries to make sense of her circumstances.... the novel paints a poignant portrait of a specific time and place in America." •5-Star review, Asher Syed, Readers' Favorite: Jeb and Sam Wilder navigate a frequently nomadic existence through imaginative play..... While the setting is historical, the novel is definitely literary fiction and absolutely worth reading. Very highly recommended. Award-winning writer Aden Ross received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah. She taught literature; creative writing; theater; and interdisciplinary courses in art, music, and philosophy for over two decades. Her plays and poetry have been anthologized in numerous publications. Her libretto for "Dreamkeepers," written for the Utah Centennial Opera, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Outside academia, she has survived 25 productions of her plays, a serious Harley accident, teaching piano lessons, moving 55 times, selling Ferraris, and being locked down while teaching inside Utah State Prison.