TRUE WOMEN

A Texan first-novelist offers a sweeping historical based on the lives of her own female ancestors—a three-generational epic brimful with all the energy, drama, and occasional ingenuousness one expects from the Lone Star State. Whenever Windle trotted out the family legends of how her maternal great-great-grandmother Euphemia Texas Ashby King scared a Comanche raider off her land with a rifle, or how her paternal great-grandmother Georgia Lawshe Woods shot a Yankee captain for threatening her daughter's virtue, her children expressed doubt that women ever behaved in such a way. The result is this exhaustively researched tale of the King and Woods clans, who farmed, fought, and bred in the fertile south-central towns of San Marcos and Seguin. Beginning with five-year-old Euphemia's witnessing the aftermath of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, which led to a mass female flight away from Santa Anna's army, Windle traces Euphemia's return to Seguin, where she marries one of the infamous Rowdy King Boys, establishes a horse-breeding farm, and begins a dynasty of her own—all while fending off Comanche and panther attacks and weathering the whipsawing political scene as Texas becomes a republic, then a state, then a member of the Confederacy, and finally a state again. Meanwhile, Georgia Lawshe, a plantation-owner's daughter, is ripped from her genteel surroundings to resettle with her physician husband in sleepy San Marcos. Practical Georgia soon establishes a thriving cotton plantation and refuses to be distracted even by the Civil War from supervising the building of a family estate. The stubborn, make-do genes of these two pioneer women come in handy through several more generations of Texas females—who suffer through tornados, Yankee occupations, death, divorce, and the Depression with relative aplomb—before combining in the form of the author herself. Windle stumbles occasionally in her effort to justify some of her protagonists' actions—but the author's passion for the landscapes and people of Texas overshadows these minor flaws. (First printing of 150,000; Literary Guild Dual Selection for February)