Texas Reads>> archiveGlenn Dromgoole
4.24.16 Epic novel probes early days of Texas oil
Titans, the fourth Texas epic from San Antonio novelist Leila Meacham, features twins separated at birth who find their lives intertwined in the early days of Texas oil (Grand Central Publishing, $26 hardcover).
Nathan Holloway is content with life on the family wheat farm near Gainesville until a wealthy stranger from Dallas arrives, claiming to be his birth father.
Samantha Gordon is the only child of a well-to-do ranching couple near Fort Worth. Although she is very happy with her adoptive parents, Samantha naturally has questions about where she came from. A mysterious letter from an Oklahoma doctor sets her on a quest to know more.
Meanwhile, Texas is anticipating an oil boom. The story is set in 1900, six years after oil was discovered in Corsicana and a year before the first big boom would blow in at Spindletop, near Beaumont. Nathan and Samantha, at age twenty, become major figures in an effort by a Dallas company to drill for oil on the Gordons’ ranch property. Love, lies, secrets, loyalty, betrayal and triumph all come into play as the story unfolds.
Meacham keeps the reader moving quickly through the 594-page saga as she did with her earlier Texas epics — Roses (2010), Tumbleweeds (2012), and Somerset (2014). I have enjoyed all four books, reading each in just two or three days, and they’re all in the 500- to 600-page range. Her novels are well-researched family dramas, packed with numerous twists, turns, and surprises. With Mother’s Day just around the corner, Titans might be on the wish list of moms who are Meacham fans.
Meacham, aged seventy-seven, wrote Roses after retiring as a high school English teacher. Back in the 1980s she penned three romance novels, and now that she has become a best-selling author those three earlier books are being reissued starting this summer. Meanwhile, she is at work on another novel set in Paris (France, not Texas) during World War II.
Meacham will be presented the A. C. Greene Award, given annually to a distinguished Texas author, at the 2016 West Texas Book Festival in Abilene in September.
Texas women: Noted Austin author Sarah Bird pays tribute to Texas women in an essay published as a small gift book, A Love Letter to Texas Women (University of Texas Press, $16.95 hardcover).
“Whatever end of the political spectrum you want to come at her from,” writes Bird, “there is something undeniably special about the Texas Woman. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe you are special,” she continues, “because the rest of the world does.”
Lady Bird Johnson and Laura Bush get specific recognition, as well as Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, Barbara Jordan, the writer’s classmates at a Catholic school who made her feel welcome as a newcomer, the friendly ladies at a neighborhood beauty salon, and women who teach their men to dance.
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Glenn Dromgoole is co-author, with Carlton Stowers, of 101 Essential Texas Books Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
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