Morning Star

Morning Star is a completed 80,000-word historical Christian novel inspired by the remarkable true story of James Edson White and his journey down the Mississippi River.

Set in 1894, Edson builds and launches the Morning Star, a missionary steamboat equipped with a printing press, school, and chapel. He hopes to serve and educate neglected communities in a South still divided after the Civil War. Edson believes that with enough faith and determination, he can help heal a broken region.

But the mission doesn’t go according to plan. He encounters poverty, racial division, illness, financial hardship, and people whose wounds cannot be repaired by plans alone. As the mission struggles to survive, Edson realizes that God isn’t only working through him—God is working on him.

At its heart, Morning Star is about the collision between vision and people.