Shelby Hearon's excellent twelfth novel opens, "And they lived 
happily ever after." It ends, "Once upon a time." The opening and 
closing lines echo many of the themes of the novel. The book opens 
with Cile Tate leaving her Presbyterian preacher husband to return to 
the early love of her life, Drew Williams.

    When Cile decides to leave Eben Tate, she is amazed that he 
announces her abandonment of him and their two daughters from his 
pulpit. All this makes Cile a fallen woman in the eyes of the church 
members and the citizens of Waco, the bastion of Baptist religion in 
Texas.

    The title reflects one of the Baptist tenets that is so often 
satirized—that hug dancing is a prelude to fornication. Cile and Drew 
are hug dancing in a serious way.

    Drew's mother, Lila Beth, introduces Cile to his socialite wife, Mary 
Virginia. It is through Lila Beth that Cile and Drew resume the love 
they knew as young people.

    The novel begins almost at the end and then twists back and forth 
over the three months it takes for Cile and Drew, once teenaged hug 
dancers, to find a way to "live happily ever after."

_________________________________________________________

SHELBY HEARON is a former president of the Texas Institute of 
Letters and a charter inductee into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. 
She was born in Kentucky, grew up in Texas, and now lives in 
Burlington, Vermont.


Number Thirty-nine: The Texas Tradition Series