Milk Letters

by Angela Welch Prusia

Two best friends. An old stack of letters. And a painful goodbye.

Thirteen-year-old Kate hates visiting the nursing home. Residents shuffle down the hallways like zombies, lost in the space between now and forever.

Oma doesn’t even know Kate exists. Dementia has robbed her great grandmother of coherent thoughts.

But when Kate finds a stack of letters written in German in 1926, she is surprised to discover hidden messages. Oma is more than a frail woman with frosted white hair and blue eyes clouded by cataracts.

How does Oma’s surprising past parallel the hardest goodbye of Kate’s life?

277 pages, Paperback

Published December 20, 2024

About the author

Angela loves teenagers. Their stories are authentic. Their enthusiasm, infectious. And their honesty, refreshing. (Fun fact: students are her best advanced readers.) Since Angela loves to write, her favorite audience is . . . you guessed it, teenagers.

That’s also the reason she volunteers with Teen Reach, a biblically-based camp and mentoring program for at-risk teens largely residing in foster care. In fact, when you purchase one of Angela's books, a portion helps send more teens to camp.

Her stories are 6.8 parts fiction and 3.2 parts crazy stories from her life. That’s what happens when she loses a bet and ends up in a BMX race or gets caught in a thunderstorm with her husband on a tandem bike several miles from the nearest town.

Angela taught middle school for five years, so one of her favorite things to do as an author is visit 6-8 grades classrooms and book clubs, either in person or virtually.

Life is a crazy adventure meant to be embraced. Angela would love to hear about your wildest dreams and your most extraordinary days.

Reviews

[Eira Hawthorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Milk Letters is a moving coming-of-age story that beautifully blends family history, hidden letters, and the struggles of saying goodbye. Kate’s discovery of Oma’s past gives the book a touching depth, showing how love, memory, and resilience connect across generations. A tender, emotional read that lingers long after the last page.

[Amy Stanley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book for teens (especially girls) with themes of friendship, family, and enduring hardship.

[Adelyn Bangert · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a beta reader for this book, I was very grateful to be one of the first to read it. Angela Welch Prusia was not an author I had heard of, but is definitely one I will be coming back to! Milk Letters was a fun read that switched between the point of views of two best friends. It’s very fast paced and held my interest throughout! I also liked how it was in a relatively modern setting but also showed some historical fiction aspects as the girls discovered more and more about Kate’s great grandmother who escaped to America during the Russian Revolution. Overall I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a fun read about friendship and uncovering the past!