Texas Neighbors: Grace for New Beginnings Abides in Three Endearing Romances.

By Debra White Smith. Urichsville, Ohio: Barbour, 2003. $10.95 pbk. ISBN 1-59789-111-8.

Here’s a warm and sentimental breeze, or three breezes, three novellas in the Christian romance genre – “The Key,” “The Promise,” and “The Neighbor.” Aside from the bluster and blow of most novels, Smith writes of slower life, gentler folks who take care of each other. The first two works are set in Jacksonville and the third in Tyler. Christian love and long and Smith provides models and, yes, rather pleasant reading. Readers get to know the characters. Christians do try to handle things differently, a little prayer and Bible helps. Amid abandonment, disloyalty, anger, and near-lusting, familial care and meddling, lovers succeed. The reviewer planned to read only the first entry, but I had to go on and follow these graceful figures.

The plain dialogue and natural settings are realistic. The novellas do contain hand-holding, passionate kisses, and an occasionally accidental light brushing of bodies, but this review can attest to such behavior in East Texas. Recommended.

See related note at:

http://texasparlor.blogspot.com/2006/08/romance-or-smut-collectors-alert-susan.html

Western Story - Jon Tuska

Jon Tuska’s new edition of his anthology The Western Story: A Chronological Treasury (University of Nebraska, 1995, updating the earlier 1982) contains 20 stories (most not in the previous edition) grouped by named time periods: “The East Goes West,” “Founders of the Golden Age,” “Storytellers of the Golden Age,” and “Visions of Dreams and Dancing.” Only two stories have genuine Texas connections, and both are in the last time slot: Elmer Kelton’s 1982 “Desert Command,” a military story of a thirst-driven command set around San Angelo, and Texas-born Cynthia Haseloff’s 1994 “Redemption at Dry Creek,” set in a generic dry country featuring human conditions in response to earlier killing and hard life.

While reading Tuska’s introduction, readers will notice the dates marking the inauguration of the modern Western story are scattered in the 1890s and spilling into the first decade of the 1900s. Some of the authors mentioned in the introduction or cited in the final bibliography of the period are Owen Wister, Rex Beach, Jack London, Marah Ellis Ryan, Stewart Edward White, Mark Twain, Frederick Remington, Bret Harte, John Neihardt, Clarence Mulford, B.M. Bowers (a woman), and Texans Andy Adams and O. Henry. Tuska mentions that this edition’s collection is different from the previous and from other Western anthologists.