Stormy Weather

I like this author, so know the content will be well researched and presented. It always takes me a chapter to get really captivated, but then this book really holds the reader. As you read, you began to know the personalities of the main characters and follow the various situations as the author leads you on a journey. Good read. Interesting look at a time in our nations history from a different perspective.

Lately I've read so many novels that have disappointed. Not this one! While the subject matter didn't appear to be something I'd be interested in (I'm not one for "a girl and her horse" stories), I'm glad that I listened to the reviews here and bought this book. It's the story of 3 girls, and their mother and father set in Texas during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The father's a ner-do-well whose death leaves the mother and the girls with few options, but to retreat to a broken down ranch house and try to make a living. Their story is moving, wry, and poignant. It's beautifully written; each word chosen precisely and carefully - a pleasure to read. The descriptions are lyrical, the characters are memorable, particularly Jeanine, the middle sister. She tells her horse Smokey Joe, that he's "a rocket," but the same could be said of her! This memorable book is a keeper.

With all the heartbreaking precision of a Walker Evans photograph, Paulette Jiles' second novel, STORMY WEATHER, tells the story of the Stoddard women in the oil fields of East Texas during the Great Depression, their trials and their triumph. As in her deeply moving first novel, ENEMY WOMEN which was set during the Civil War, Jiles' gift for creating vibrant characters, characters we come to care about, is remarkable. And her ability to weave history, fiction, and grounded place develops a tension in the paragraphs that is staggering. Jeanine Stoddard, something of a tomboy, charged with covering up her drunken womanizing father's misdeeds, and blamed by her sisters and mother for protecting him is the emotional heart of the novel. Her slow to develop romance with widowed rancher Ross Everett, her dogged determination to save the family farm in the face of the dust bowl, and her hopes and dreams pinned on a racehorse named Smoky Joe, is a character of such pluck and promise, such a wide-eyed, innocent embrace of the world around her that she captivates the reader. The broadened canvas of history, geography, and popular culture, with remarkable writing about oil rigs and horses, does not detract from or dilute the story - rather, it takes this episodic and cinematic vision and gives it a bed on which all the stories settle. There are many instances in STORMY WEATHER where the movement from public history to personal story is so seamless one recalls Doctorow's RAGTIME. The risk, of course, is that we, modern readers, invited to deconstruct this way, will bring our rich bag of reference points to that Great Depression - classic, cliched, and captured in real voices or pictures, and see whether Jiles adds anything to already crowded territory. As she did in ENEMY WOMEN with the Civil War, so Jiles in STORMY WEATHER succeeds admirably. The dust storm that catches Jeanine and Ross out on the road is vivid, terrifying, and palpable. Descriptions of small towns, oil fields, the relationships between sisters, and the wreckage of the land in the dust bowl, are startling, clear, and graceful. And when Jeanine's scarf catches in the chain drive of her John Deere in the peach orchard, it catches in our throat as well. As in all great fiction, we come to care, and that investment in characters and their lives, enriches us. Paulette Jiles' Stoddard's, and a rich cast surrounding them, are characters we're better for knowing, better for shaking the dust off images we thought we knew and looking again.

This is an "I can't put it down" kind of book. The story is a great picture of small town Texas set in the 1930's. An amazing weaving of events, people, places, attitudes and tragedies. It held my attention and was a book I can recommend. What a pleasure it was to read.

I loved Enemy Women, her civil war novel,so was thrilled to see she had written another book. I just finished reading and want to tell everyone who will listen to me to read Stormy Weather. The setting is harsh (1930s Texas during the drought and the Great Depression) but the writing is so lyrical and beautiful. The characters are fully developed and likeable. And the love story and tension she creates between the two is delicious agony for the reader. This was a reading experience where I had to stop often just to soak up the images she created. I rarely write book reviews, but was moved to do so for this wonderful book!

Jiles is a brilliant storyteller and a careful craftsman of detail and dialog. She tells a memorable tale here of a Texas family in the Great Depression who lose their husband and father to drink and gambling and are forced to survive without him, somehow. Quarter horses race down a track at sunset, and the winner pelts the face of the loser with gravel and dirt from his pounding hooves. A well strikes oil, sending pieces of the rig into the sky, as onlookers scream with joy and run like hell. A tough, widower rancher courts a twenty year old girl, and when he says "you're messin with me again" it is the most romantic thing ever said. Do not wait for the beach trip to read this one at a single sitting. I think it is one of the sleeper hits of the season- it reminds me of Sara Gruen's "Water for Elephants"- another colorful story of the dark days of the 1930s. Get it now.