Novel based on Iowa WWII refugee hostel getting national recognition

"Scattergood," youth fiction work set in West Branch, praised in New York Times review

Author H.M Bouwman discusses her historic youth fiction novel “Scattergood,” set in West Branch, at a book reading and signing event at the West Branch Public Library. (Pat Kinney photo)

WEST BRANCH — A book that went nowhere for a decade about a little-remembered Iowa act of kindness during World War II is now going places.

“Scattergood” is a historic fiction novel for middle-school-grade readers. It is centered around an Iowa farm girl’s relationship with refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe who are sheltered in a Quaker hostel near West Branch. The book has received favorable reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere.

It was a work which the author, H.M. Bouwman of St. Paul, Minn., had chalked up to experience years ago. She had, literally, put the book away after it did not gain traction with publishers. The revived interest is, to her, stunning.

“I started writing this book in 2003, when I was pregnant with my now almost 22-year old child,” said Michigan native Bouwman, a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul and mother of two adult children.

She shared her astonished gratification over the newfound recognition at a reading and book-signing event last week at the West Branch Public Library, the town where the book is set, in 1941. She also spoke to a group of 66 seventh graders there about the youth fiction novel.

“It’s been weird,” she said at the West Branch event. “My other books have not gotten that kind of attention.” Another of her works, “A Crack in the Sea,” had gotten some good reviews and was awarded in Minnesota, “but not the New York Times book review kind of level.

“It’s been great. My publisher is very happy,” she said with a laugh. “It’s unusual for me. I don’t know how it’s going to translate long term. But it’s been nice to get those kind of reviews and know that people like it.”

It’s also drawn renewed attention to the real-life Scattergood Friends School, which Bouwman researched, visited and interviewed residents about for the work.

The central character in the story is an Iowa farm girl, Peggy Mott, who finds her first love with a Jewish refugee boy living at the Scattergood hostel. At the same time, she is helping her cousin and best friend Delia face a terminal illness. Peggy also befriends a Dutch professor at the hostel whose family has gone missing in Europe.

The New York Times review, in part, says “Scattergood” “brims from the get-go with engaging details” and “is a brave, beautiful book.”

West Branch is best known as the birthplace of President Herbert Hoover, which is maintained by the National Park Service, and his presidential library and museum. Hoover was raised as a Quaker but his is only one story of the Quakers in and around West Branch.

Cover art by Angie Kang for H.M Bouwman’s book “Scattergood” from the author’s website.

The Scattergood Friends School, east of West Branch and north of present-day Interstate 80, opened in 1890 as a Quaker boarding school where students could get a well-rounded education while remaining sheltered “from the evils of the world.” The school was unable to sustain itself and closed in 1931. It reopened in 1938 as a hostel for European refugees brought to the U.S. by the American Friends Committee. The refugees included European Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler’s escalating repression and pogroms that culminated in the Holocaust and World War II.

Scattergood hosted 186 “guests” from Europe, providing them a place to stay until they found more permanent residency and employment, through 1944 near the war’s end. Education programming resumed at Scattergood after that and the school has remained in existence to this day. More information about the school may be found at the link here.

Bouwman said she first learned of Scattergood when Mason City-born German American author Michael Luick-Thrams came to the Twin Cities to discuss his nonfiction work about Scattergood, “Out of Hitler’s Reach.”

“I really was intrigued by it, got really interested in it, decided it was going to be the setting of this novel,” Bouwman said, prompting her to totally revise an earlier draft of the work.

That was one inspiration for “Scattergood,” Bouwman said. “The other one being my own cousin’s death, which was very sudden, and happened when we were 22, 23. Not at all the same as what happens in the book. But the book was a way to kind of think about it and explore it more.

“And when I started writing, I didn’t know how these two things connected. I just knew I wanted to set it here, and I wanted to keep exploring it.”

In the novel, when Peggy visits the refugees at Scattergood, “what she discovers there is, the people in that hostel have had enormous losses of their own,” Bouwman said. “So she’s thinking about her own upcoming loss and is already starting to grieve it, and she’s talking to a man who has lost his entire family.”

She kept working on and revising “Scattergood,” she said, and in about 2015, her literary agent “sent it to every single publisher and editor she could think of.

“And nobody wanted it,” Bouwman said. “Partly because I think it was older middle grades and that wasn’t as viable a category as it is now.”

Also, she said, “Editors would send back responses and say, ‘The writing is really nice, but I don’t believe this is World War II.’ They would say things like ‘They didn’t have indoor plumbing?’ A lot of the responses would come from people who didn’t understand anything about farm life. A lot of people didn’t have indoor plumbing during this time!” Bouwman based Peggy’s farm on her own grandparents’ farm in Michigan.

She moved on to other projects which published faster. There were no takers for “Scattergood.” She and her agent decided they had exhausted options.

“I said, ‘Okay, this is the book that goes under the bed, that taught me a lot about writing but it’s never going to get published.’ “ she said.

Then a bit of serendipity occurred.

“When I was working on my seventh book in the summer of 2022,” Bouwman related, “an editor who had read (“Scattergood”) in 2013 contacted my agent and said, ‘I just moved to a different publisher, I’m looking for middle-grade literature and I’ve been thinking about this book. Do you still have it?’

Her agent called and asked Bouwman if she could send it out again. “I said ‘I guess, but she’s not going to buy it. They always say nice things and they never buy it.’ “

But the agent asked her to re-send the book to her — because the agent, having written off chances of its publication, had deleted it from her computer. Bouwman sent it, but put it out of her mind — until she encountered the same editor at a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English. They’d never met in person.

The editor said she was reading Bouwman’s book. Bouwman thought she meant another work. But it was “Scattergood.” It had been so long since Bouwman had last read the book herself, she admitted, that she didn’t even remember some parts of what she wrote, but kept a poker face as the editor discussed it in detail.

Two or three days before Christmas, the editor told Bouwman and her agent she was going to get a contract to publish the book. It’s in stores and available online now; a second printing may occur soon.

“It’s been wonderful” Bouwman said. “I thought this book was never, ever” going to come to print. She had visited Scattergood previously, and re-connected with school to let staff there know the book was finally going to be published.

The New York Times reviewer also paid Bouwman a kindness when she alerted her and her agent to an error in one part of the book — in which Peggy refers to the college in Iowa City not as the University of Iowa, but as “Iowa State University,” its rival sister school in Ames. It dates back to a time when the Iowa City institution was referred to as the “State University of Iowa” and the school in Ames was a college. It’s being corrected for later printings. When it was suggested to Bouwman by an East Coast editor that no one will notice, Bouwman knew better.

“I said, ‘Do you not live in the Midwest?’ Everyone will notice!” she said, laughing.

What’s of more significant notice in the reviewer’s eyes about the story, however, is how Peggy finds a connection between her situation with her cousin and the Scattergood refugees.

“This is where ‘Scattergood’ truly shines,” The New York Times review said, “because on some level it investigates not only whether we can survive great loss, but also how.”

The book is a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection for advanced readers. It’s also a Lit Hub “most anticipated book of 2025.” More information about the book can be found at Bouwman’s website here

Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. They are listed below. Clink on the links to check them out, subscribe for free - and, if you believe in the value of quality journalism, support this column and/or any of theirs with a paid subscription.

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