Stormy Weather (edition 2007)

As usual Jiles gives us an easy to swallow history lesson, this time with a strong resilient family of women at its center. Our heroine is Jeanine, one of three sisters, and the favorite of their father Jack, a gambler, lover of horses, and chaser of the Texas oil fields during the dark years of the Depression. Jack Stoddard's wife Elizabeth is forced to provide for her family in one shack after another as they move from town to town. Gradually, hopes for anything better dwindle to nothing, and Jack dies as a result of his own folly. The women head back to Elizabeth's family's abandoned farm where they set out to repair the house and make it livable. Jeanine's goal is to restore the farm as well, but this becomes complicated by her on-again, off-again love affair with Ross Everett, a well-to-do gambler and horse owner she'd met as a child when she followed her father around to the bars and horse races. The characters of the Stoddard women are all different; their interactions with each other are some of the best parts of the story. The descriptions of life in the terrible times of the American drought and the dust bowl, the Texas oil fields, and the world of horse racing in those days are well done. Jiles always provides a romance with a touch of the bittersweet. I would recommend this book, although it is not the author's best. ( )

OK, it sounds like a bumper sticker platitude. But: I {heart} Paulette Jiles. This is the third of her books that I’ve picked up, and none have disappointed. She peoples interesting stories into the midst of historical events; the reader gets a fascinating history lesson for mind and heart. Although not my favorite of hers, this is still a great story.

Stormy Weather (cue the song) takes us across the state of Texas during the dust bowl crisis of the 1930s. We learn a lot about oil drilling, match racing and farming and ranching. Perhaps this wasn’t my favorite Jiles because of the topics; I’m not into horses and the oil business makes my eyes glaze over.

Some of her descriptions had me saying, ‘yep, been there’. Having driven the roads between relatives in Oklahoma for years, I’ve watched “The horsehead pumpjacks {working} away untended, nodding and nodding, as if perpetually agreeing with everything…” And at Grandma’s house, “How many times had they hung sheets to sit beside the stove, doubled up naked in a number three washtub…?” (For more of her writing, see the CK.) But, it’s her descriptions of what people did to cope with their situations that make this book.

“Whatever kind of life they had been able to cobble together despite the Depression and the oil fields and their father’s love of good times and gambling was collapsing all around them. . . . They tried to piece their lives together the way people draw maps of remembered places; they get things wrong and out of proportion, they erase and redraw again.”

The family at the center of this story: Jack Stoddard, a father who loves his family but is too fond of a good time, whose pockets empty faster than they fill. Chasing jobs all across Texas, following new oil business; because he was good with horses, he could haul supplies. Dragging his family from shed to tent to shared rickety old houses. Elizabeth Tolliver Stoddard, a mother who tries to make a home with very little to work with. And their girls: Mayme, her heart on her sleeve, but a loyal and eager to help sister, 15; Jeanine, “Daddy’s girl” and the practical one, 13; and Bea, the imaginative “bookish” sister, 6 at the beginning of the story. Each (and everyone else in the story) fully realized; very good characterization.

As always with Paulette Jiles: Highly recommended. ( )

Jeanine's childhood is spent moving from one oil strike to the next along with her mother and two sisters by a father who's work involves moving pipeline, but his constantly changing addictions keep them dirt poor. Still, she is her father's favorite and because she is his confidant, she learns to be more at home on the race track or wherever the men gather to talk shop than with other women. When her father dies, the family is left with no where to turn but her mother's home place, a farm in north central Texas that has been abandoned and neglected. With the drought and the depression bearing down on them, Jeanine's determination to bring the farm back and keep her father's race horse, Smokey Joe, becomes the glue that holds the family together. ( )

Growing up in East Texas during the depression ( )

Liked the book. I kept waiting for something horrible to happen. But it didn't thank goodness. yes bad things happened. Loved the strong women in the book. Book about the depression in Tx. Liked the love story. A big depressing. And the author writes sort of with a flat affect sometimes. ( )