The Train to Estelline
Jane Roberts Wood, 2000
University of North Texas Press
209 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781574410785
Summary
"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 West Texas. Jane Roberts Wood brings this delightful and affecting epistolary novel a tender touch and a wry sense of humor.
The Lucinda Richards trilogy, spanning the years from 1911 to the 1930s, has 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.
(From the publisher.)
Train to Estelline (1987) is the first novel of the trilogy; A Place Called Sweet Shrub (1990), the second; and Dance a Little Longer (1993), the third.