In 1915 it has been three years since Lucy Richards left 
her teaching post in West Texas and returned home where she 
is busy being indispensable to her eccentric mother, keeping 
her Aunt Catherine comfortable, and taking on many of the 
chores her very pregnant sister no longer feels up to. She 
decides to choose a husband from the local beaus, but none 
of them stand a chance when handsome, irreverent Josh Arnold 
comes to town. The newlyweds move to the sleepy hamlet of 
Sweet Shrub, Arkansas, where they are soon caught up in the 
lives of their neighbors and discover that the surface 
tranquility of the town hides simmering tensions and unrest 
that will inevitably result in tragedy.


"I could not put it down! Wood’s lively, eccentric characters 
leap off the page and will live in the reader’s heart long 
after the book is closed. Her prose is as strong and as 
graceful as the earlier times she portrays. A superb novel!"
—Actress Jean Stapleton

 
“This wholesome novel makes for easy, pleasant reading.”
—Publishers Weekly


“A good page-turner becomes obsessively fascinating! . . . 
Wood makes us feel we are listening to conversations that took 
place years ago, but are as real as those we heard over lunch.”
—Texarkana Gazette


“Pure enjoyment. . . . A deceptively innocent little book about 
life in a small town and the dangers inherent in such. Most of 
all it is filled with fascinating individuals with . . . 
wonderful, eccentric natures.”
—The Indianapolis Star


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JANE ROBERTS WOOD received the Texas Institute of 
Letters award in 1998 for the Best Short Story and received a 
fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to 
study at Yale, as well as a NEA Fellowship. A member of TIL and 
PEN, she lives with her husband, Dub, in Dallas, Texas.