Quincie Bolliver

This story unfolds in an East Texas oil town in the 1920s when the oil fields and economy were drying up. Through the eyes of a girl growing to adulthood we watch various believable and generally quite likeable characters trying to get by in tough times. One woman runs a boardinghouse where Quincie and her father stay. Another tells fortunes. The men work the derricks and other oil jobs. This story flows effortlessly and without any artificial plot contrivances that an author less faithful to the telling of normal lives might have inserted. Mary King gives us a wonderfully simple but enlightening study of character and setting. She weaves an environmental theme throughout the story as the more philosophical characters ponder what it means to extract ancient oil from the ground. I felt like I had glimpsed a time and place I had never seen before and learned of a culture whose remnants are found still in many parts of the near Southwest. It was a joy to see a woman's perspective on this culture. I read this book late at night and felt both relaxed and transformed by the story and its unpretentious prose. The characters and their struggles had a timeless human quality.