Dance a Little Longer

The Lucinda Lucy Richards trilogy spanning the years from 1911 to the 1930s has everything good books should have: a variety of landscapes characters of all ages and social classes an overall tenderness that never lapses into sentimentality and a sense of the comic amidst the tragic. Lucy is feisty funny and completely open-armed about life. Josh passionately confronts danger and greed and prejudice with courage and humor and sometimes with bare fists. Even the minor characters are so rife with color that you first turn the pages quickly to see what they will do next and then you turn them slowly so as to savor each page of this remarkable trilogy.The year is 1931 and Lucy Richards Arnoldnow a mother of a precocious four-year-old sonis in rural West Texas teaching in the school where her husband Josh is principal and struggling to make a success of their farm during the bleak hard times of the Great Depression. Out of this barren landscape rich and colorful characters emerge as if from a fertile land. Before the years end Lucy is faced with a loss of such magnitude that she must struggle to find a way to recapture the joy in her very existence.