Product Description

From Paulette Jiles, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Enemy Women, comes a poignant and unforgettable story of hardship, sacrifice, and strength in a tragic time—and of a desperate dream born of an undying faith in the arrival of a better day

Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Stoddard girls—responsible Mayme, whip-smart tomboy Jeanine, and bookish Bea—know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks; that is, when he's not spending his meager earnings at gambling joints, race tracks, and dance halls. And in every small town in which the windblown family settles, mother Elizabeth does her level best to make each sparse, temporary house they inhabit a home.

But the fall of 1937 ushers in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, and the family's fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a questionable "accident" leaves Elizabeth and her girls alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times. With no choice left to them, they return to the abandoned family farm.

It is Jeanine, proud and stubborn, who single-mindedly devotes herself to rebuilding the farm and their lives. But hard work and good intentions won't make ends meet or pay the back taxes they owe on their land. In desperation, the Stoddard women place their last hopes for salvation in a wildcat oil well that eats up what little they have left . . . and on the back of late patriarch Jack's one true legacy, a dangerous racehorse named Smoky Joe. And Jeanine, the fatherless "daddy's girl," must decide if she will gamble it all . . . on love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185985 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Released on: 2007-05-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Jiles's eloquent, engaging sophomore novel celebrates four strong women toughing out the Great Depression in the Texas dust bowl. As the book opens in 1927, Elizabeth Stoddard and husband Jack have three daughters: the pretty Mayme, the tomboyish Jeanine and the writerly Bea. Jeanine, resented for being daddy's favorite, soon becomes the novel's primary point of view. After the disgraced Jack dies in 1937, the four Stoddard women move back to the 150-acre homeplace on the Brazos River in Central Texas. Drought, hail and dust storms, land-tax debts and grinding poverty make life a struggle; radio shows, horse-racing, wildcat oil well speculation and stuttering news reporter friend Milton Brown provide diversions. Jeanine falls in love with local rancher Ross Everett; Mayme dates soldier Vernon. Visceral detail of the 1930s rancher life and the hardscrabble setting add authenticity, particularly in the characters' feel for horses. While forthright, some of the dialogue is less than believable (as when Ross compliments Jeanine on her "furious bloody purple" dress), but it serves the characters' greater-than-usual emotional bandwidth. Jiles winds this gritty saga up on the eve of WWII with a patchwork quilt's worth of hope. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Ron Charles

Paulette Jiles's previous book, the enthralling Enemy Women, described a Missouri family caught between Northern and Southern militias during the Civil War. Her new historical novel shows the same interest in the way ordinary people, particularly young women, have coped with national trauma, but not all national traumas deliver the same dramatic energy. This time around, her resilient young women are caught in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that hit Texas in the 1930s. The stagnation that made that ordeal so devastating -- no work, no rain, no nothing -- makes this a challenging background for drama. Compared to the infinite horrors of Civil War battles, there are only so many ways to describe another dry day on a dead farm. Steinbeck knew the secret: Keep those Joads moving.

Unfortunately, all the movement in Stormy Weather is up front, and the novel peaks early. In the opening section, young Jeanine Stoddard trails after her father, Jack, with a mixture of adulation and alarm. "He had always been a shape changer who could talk the legs off an iron stove," Jiles writes. He has a good job, delivering pipe to the oil wells erupting all over Texas, but the work keeps him on the road and denies his family any stability. "Her father made up his mind to move the way birds made up their minds in midflight, wild, startling shifts that sent them spinning away through vagrant airs to yet another oil field." To reassure his wife that he's not drinking or gambling or carrying on with other women, he takes little Jeanine with him while he drinks and gambles and carries on with other women. It's a dangerous position to put her in, of course, and cruel, too, considering the way her sisters blame her for lying to protect him.

Once he's out of the picture, Jack's family is a whole lot better off, but a deadly stability settles over the story. No more wild nights, no more geysers exploding out of the earth, no more covering up for a charming drunk who'll promise anything. Jeanine, her sisters and her mother return to their decrepit family farm in central Texas and set about the arduous task of rehabbing the house and reclaiming the fields. Concerned neighbors warn, "Y'all are going to starve out here," but these young women "piece their lives together the way people draw maps of remembered places; they get things wrong and out of proportion, they erase and redraw again."

Stormy Weather is a big-hearted, life-affirming novel, but it's a little sweet, a little earnest, a "Little House on the Prairie." Yes, the Stoddard women face challenges, but only to surmount them at the last minute. How will they ever pay those back taxes on the farm? Don't worry, Mom tells her daughters -- and us. "They're not going to throw a widow woman and three daughters off their land because of back taxes." Phew, that's good to know. Mrs. Stoddard keeps investing their hard-earned money in an old oil well that everybody tells her is dry, but in fact it's such a sure thing that I was itching to sink a few grand in there myself. And then there's the novel's great crisis: Jeanine's little sister falls down a well, and their cat calls for help. (What's that, Lassie? You want me to contact your lawyer?)

These weaknesses are disappointing considering Jiles's obvious skills. For more than 30 years, she's been a successful poet, and her descriptions here of oil drilling, horse racing and terrifying dust storms crackle with excitement. She's also a master at creating the most charming romance -- a tender love affair between Jeanine and a young widower who must convince her that it's time to think about life outside her family.

But again and again these wonderful moments are retarded by a lack of tension or diluted by sentimentality. "Times were hard," Jiles writes, "very hard, and once in a while people liked to hear stories with happy endings." That's true, of course, but we don't want to see rainbows during stormy weather. No matter how unabashedly hopeful we may be, we've got to believe along the way that those happy endings are seriously at risk.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From AudioFile
Colleen Delany brings out the strength of character in three women who struggle to survive the Depression in Texas. Delanys drawl rings as true as the authors research, and her narration adds to the local color that is so much a part of the story. Delany differentiates the Stoddard daughters with varying tonality. Writer Bea is dreamy; Mayme is practical. The focus character is Jeanine, beloved by her late father, a charming, alcoholic gambler. Delany portrays Jeanine as a complex character, showing her determination when she fights for her family and her confusion as she tries to choose what she really wants in life. S.W. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

A few loose ends...
In general I liked the story, but I think the description of the book is a little misleading.

From reading the description, I believed there would have been more about Jack's death, but once it happened, it was only referred to in passing on a few occasions. A loose end that was never really dealt with by the author. Also, I expected more to be written about Smoky Joe and horse racing in general than there actually was.

The characters were interesting, although some were a bit odd and I'm quite sure why some of them were written into the story, but Jeanine is a great heroine and I enjoyed her story.

A nice read but could have been better.

No-Frills Texas Heroine's Story Told Like Poetry
San Antonio writer Paulette Jiles is a poet first, and it shows in her imagery and in the cadence of her sentences. They have an almost musical lilt: "A pouring wave of sheep fled down a hillside, answering some unheard call, and the dense bank of clouds to the northeast told of a windstorm to come."

"Stormy Weather" is the second novel for Jiles, after her critically acclaimed Civil War novel, "Enemy Woman." This one is a quieter novel, more tuned in to the brutal dust bowl landscape of West Texas, and to the hungry, threadbare people living through the Great Depression. They wear wedding gowns made from old draperies, and repair their roofs with crushed tin cans instead of shingles.

The story is built around Jeanine Stoddard, a strong, tomboyish young woman, who almost single-handedly carries her family through the hardest years. Jeanine is the middle daughter, beloved and trusted by her no-account father, Jack Stoddard. In the opening chapters Jeanine is a mere 9-year-old girl, but already she's driving her drunken father home from a night of hell-raising and womanizing. Jiles makes no missteps here, bringing Jeanine and the whole Stoddard clan to life along with Texas in the 1930s.

Even with World War II looming in Europe, wildcat oil strikes happen just often enough to keep the population believing in better times. The oil boom brings tragedy to the Stoddard family when Jack is killed by "sour gas," but later on the boom redeems itself when Mrs. Stoddard invests their hard-earned money in an old, dry well that a new driller reworks. The description of that well coming in are some of the best in the book. I was rattled by the earth-shaking blow-out just as if I were there, watching in awe with the otheres as the oil geysered into the blue West Texas sky.

While reading this book, I was reminded time and again of a personal favorite of mine, George Sessions Perry's "Hold Autumn In Your Hand." There are similarities beyond just the time period: problems on the land, risky ventures, a no-frills love story, and the unyielding optimism of the characters. If I were a high school teacher assigning Texas novels to my students, "Stormy Weather" would rank right at the top of the list. It's a sound, earthy novel with a soul as sweet as sugared peaches.

Please do your research.
While my husband read and enjoyed Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles, I have to admit that I only read a chapter or two. I was turned off by the mispelling of McAlester, Oklahoma on the first page, and again on page 6. She spelled it "McAllister." Most other place names seem to be spelled correctly. I'm reasonably sure she referred to the actual town and not a made-up place, so why not be sure it's spelled correctly?