The Train to Estelline

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.'I have longed for a wider world, a great adventure. And now it’s here. I’m so happy I can hardly breathe.' So ends seventeen-year-old Lucinda Richards’ diary entry for August 17, 1911, starting her job as the new school teacher for the White Star school in the Panhandle. Jane Roberts Wood brings to this delightful and affecting epistolary novel a tender touch and a wry sense of humor.'I ran [this book] through three generations of readers-mother, wife, and child-and unanimously they read it with pleasure . . . Lucy is a young lady you need to know.'-F. E. Abernethy' . . . the kind of bright and original work that evokes from some of us that soundest of compliments, ’Wish I’d written that.’'-Texas Books in Review'A truly fine tale of the indomitable human spirit, told in the honest voice of a strong young schoolmarm in early day West Texas.'-Larry L. King'This is one of those books that is easy to get into, hard to get out of. Once started, it is nearly impossible to put down. Once put down, it is not easily forgotten.'-Fort Worth Star-TelegramJANE ROBERTS WOOD received the Texas Institute of Letters award in 1998 for the Best Short Story, 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 Argyle, Texas.