Tumbleweeds
Leila Meacham, 2012
Grand Central Publishing
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455509232
Summary
Recently orphaned, eleven-year-old Cathy Benson feels she has been dropped into a cultural and intellectual wasteland when she is forced to move from her academically privileged life in California to the small town of Kersey in the Texas Panhandle where the sport of football reigns supreme.
She is quickly taken under the unlikely wings of up-and-coming gridiron stars and classmates John Caldwell and Trey Don Hall, orphans like herself, with whom she forms a friendship and eventual love triangle that will determine the course of the rest of their lives. Taking the three friends through their growing up years until their high school graduations when several tragic events uproot and break them apart, the novel expands to follow their careers and futures until they reunite in Kersey at forty years of age.
Told with all of Meacham's signature drama, unforgettable characters, and plot twists, readers will be turning the pages, desperate to learn how it all plays oute. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1938 or 1939
• Where—Minden, Louisiana, USA
• Raised—Texas
• Education—B.A., North Texas State University
• Currently—lives in San Antonio, Texas
Beginning in the 1960s, Ms. Meacham taught English to high school students in a handful of cities in Texas. She published three romance novels in the mid-1980s with Walker & Company, but she mostly found the process burdensome. “I didn’t like the isolation,” she said. “I didn’t like the discipline required. I didn’t like the deadlines. So I put away my pen. The romance novel was not my calling.”
Ms. Meacham was a decade into her retirement, growing increasingly bored...when she returned to Roses, a manuscript that she had started in the 1980s. When she completed the novel, one of her friends made a call to a niece, who just happened to be married to David McCormick, a literary agent in New York. Mr. McCormick agreed to take on the book and later sold it to Grand Central, which published it in January 2010. Reviewers compared it to those door-stopper-size, soap operatic novels by the likes of Belva Plain and Barbara Taylor Bradford that were popular in the late 1970s and ‘80s. [She is currently working a a sequel to Roses.]....
Tumbleweeds [2012], which takes place between 1979 and 2008, begins in a small West Texas town and revolves around two star high school football players who fall for the same girl. Yet other than the contemporary setting, it is very much of a piece with Roses, with twists piled atop twists, and well-intentioned characters who seem to make a wreck of things. (Adapted from the New York Times "Texas Weekly.")
Book Reviews
Meacham (Roses) explores a small-town love triangle against the backdrop of Texas football in her overblown latest. Since childhood, Trey Don "TD" Hall and best friend John Caldwell have cared primarily for football and one another. But when recently orphaned Catherine Ann Benson moves to town to live with her grandmother, the boys are immediately drawn to her. At first, the three sixth-graders are just fast friends, but after adolescence sets in, their relationship deepens and complicates. Despite the boys' stellar high school football careers and Catherine Ann's equally sterling academic record, their future plans are fumbled thanks to a botched prank, a secret infatuation, and an accidental pregnancy, all of which will have consequences stretching far into the future. Spanning nearly 30 years, the novel seems unsure of its intentions: is it a romance, a sports saga, or a murder mystery?
Publishers Weekly
Meacham's second sprawling novel is as large as Texas itself. The author skillfully manipulates multiple themes of friendship, loss, guilt, and the possibility of redemption. Readers who love epic sagas that span a couple of generations will enjoy this soap opera tale of young love, betrayal, and living a life that might not have a happy ending. —Lesa Holstine, Glendale P.L., AZ
Library Journal
A topical soap opera from bestselling novelist Meacham (Roses, 2010), set on the familiar turf of small-town Texas.... Meacham captures the period details in her description of 11-year-old Cathy Benson... [who] without really meaning to...gets inside the heads of two local boys.... Well, one thing leads to another, and another, and another, and Cathy finds herself with a love bump and no place to go.... The plot is serviceable, the writing sometimes less so.... Meacham's latest is of a piece with her past work, and sure to find an eager audience among romance buffs.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The quote at the beginning of the book by Sir John Suckling says, “Our sins, like our shadows when day is in its glory, scarce appear. Toward evening, how great and monstrous they appear.” At the end, are Cathy and John able to overcome the shadows from the beginning of their lives? Or have the shadows changed them into people they would never have become otherwise?
2. At difficult moments in the novel, one of the recurring events is Cathy’s struggle with selective mutism. How does this develop from her parents’ deaths to Trey’s death? If she had been able to call the police, would the ending have been different? Would John have stayed at Harbison House?
3. Although being set in the early 1880s, there is a lot of open discussion concerning sex and birth control, even across generations, such as between Cathy and Emma. How might Cathy have been viewed differently by her readers if the book had been published during this time? Are we, as readers, able to sympathize more with Cathy because we live in an age where birth control is widely used?
4. On page 125 at the Harbison House, Trey tells John, “It’s not in me, Tiger. That’s why I need you. That’s why you’re my man. You keep me on the straight and narrow.” Discuss whether this is actually true—did Trey’s life disintegrate because he no longer had John’s presence, or did John begin to lack faith in his friend, mwhich then led to their estrangement?
5. When Cathy is in the hospital, just after Will’s birth, she says, “You are about to meet your daddy, John Will.” Rather than Trey, however, John walks into the room. How did John’s life in the priesthood mold him into a father for Will? Did you feel relief when Trey finally divulged his secret to John?
6. While working at Pelican Bay State Prison, John becomes good friends with Dr. Laura Rhinelander. Is this friendship refreshing for each of them, or does it serve to keep them tied to their pasts? What do you think each of them is looking for in the other?
7. One of the things that Deke Tyson struggles with, when he uncovers the evidence for Donny’s death, is the fine line between the truth and what is right. In the black-and-white world of justice, he should implicate both Trey and Father John in the act, but John has proven himself a good and loving man. Have you ever had a similar situation in which silence is better than the truth? What do you believe Deke should have done and why?
8. Warren Buffett once said, “It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” How was Cathy’s reputation hurt by her pregnancy? Did she ever completely lose the respect of the town? Keep in mind not only her struggles to find a job but also her transformation of Bennie’s and the aftermath of Trey’s death.
9. When John arrives at Bennie’s to first tell Cathy that Trey is back in town, “He sensed a gathering of shadows—those long, reckoning shades cast by old sins that time cannot disperse.” What are the sins that Cathy, Trey, and John committed when they were younger? What “reckoning” do those sins force each of them to come to?
10. For those who have read Leila Meacham’s previous novel, Roses, what parallels do you see and what lesson can you draw? Is pride truly a more powerful force than love? Can it take a lifetime to realize young mistakes, or is redemption possible before the end?
11. At the end of Chapter 10, Emma considers the trio’s friendship: “She worried only that Trey’s unswerving trust in Cathy and John made him vulnerable to disappointment—and her granddaughter and John open to its consequences. All human beings were subject to falling below others’ expectations, and Trey was of the particular bent that, once betrayed, there would be no rescuing of the ties that once bound.” Did Cathy and John ever truly betray him? Did he, in turn, betray them by keeping his silence?
12. Was Trey right to leave without explanation? Would Cathy and John have been able to marry, and would he have been able to move past his love for Catherine Ann? Who, ultimately, did his choice hurt the most?
13. How did the title of the novel apply as a symbol of the main characters?
14. John calls him the victim of his own nature. Do you agree and if so, explain in what ways. How did John and Cathy save Trey from himself?
15. How was Cathy’s and John’s love for Trey unique from all others? And how was that a factor in Trey “never able to make it happen again?”
(Questions issued by publisher.)