Stormy Weather
(Paulette Jiles)
The stories she is referring to belong to the years -- covered in the opening chapters of Stormy Weather -- of the 1920s and the early 1930s, when her rakish husband Jack led Elizabeth and their three daughters from one oil boom town to another, never settling anywhere for long. A drinker and a gambler in a time when both drinking and gambling were illegal, the feckless Jack dies in disgrace. As the despair and dust storms of the Great Depression fall over them, Elizabeth and her girls are left with nothing but an abandoned and decrepit family farm and a fleet, volatile racing stallion named Smoky Joe Hancock.
Of the four Stoddard women, it is Jeanine, the middle child, and her father''s favorite -- and frequently his sidekick at the Texas brush tracks where Smoky Joe raced -- who pays the highest price for the stories Jack lived. And it is she who occupies the emotional center of Paulette Jiles''s generous tale, learning to tame both the wild farm and her wild heart on her way into adulthood. Charting the women''s progress through many storms and struggles, Jiles rivets our attention to the Stoddards'' hardscrabble world of droughts, tractors, horses, oil fields, and small-town life, precisely rendering the details of labor and landscape, machinery and weather. Peopled with a vividly drawn cast of characters, from Jeanine''s sisters Mayme and Bea to her suitors, the stuttering newspaperman Milton Brown and the handsome, reticent rancher Ross Everett, Stormy Weather tells a story that balances the bleakness of hard times with the humor and resilience of people who can -- through persistence, luck, and love -- outlast them. Fulfilling the promise of her first novel, the bestselling Enemy Women, and utilizing the gift for striking language that animates her award-winning poetry, Paulette Jiles has written a magnificent, magnanimous family drama.
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