Dance a Little Longer
by By Wood, Jane Roberts
Category: Fiction , Historical

The year is 1931 and Lucy Richards Arnold - mother to a demandingly precocious four-year-old son - is in rural West Texas, teaching in the school where her husband, Josh, is principal. While trying to win over a community that seems to have little respect for formal education, Lucy and Josh are also struggling to make a success of their neglected farm during a drought and the bleak hard times of the Great Depression.Out of this barren landscape rich and colorful characters emerge as if from a fertile land: above all there is Josh, impulsive and contemplative, passionate and wise, who loves in ways few men are capable of loving and whose only fear is losing Lucy; there is Meg, a fifteen-year-old, who is able to hear the grass grow and smell out rattlers and whose ardent heart and natural wisdom are focused solely on keeping her small charge, John Patrick, safe; there is Mueller, who had always wanted to "look in a book and know what was in it" and who had hoped his sons would take a liking to the new principal; there is Bud Foster, a down-and-out cowboy who knows that "sometimes a man has to go on down the road and find something"; and there is Miriah, with a magic all her own, who waits confidently for her husband to return from the arms of another woman.Before the year's end, Lucy is faced with a loss of such magnitude that she must struggle to find a way to recapture the joy in her very existence.With the same wry sense of humor and tender but never sentimental touch that captivated readers of the first two best-selling books in the trilogy, The Train to Estelline and A Place Called Sweet Shrub, Jane Roberts Wood's Dance a Little Longer delivers what the title promises - a dance of the heart. It is Jane Roberts Wood at her finest.