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4.5
I admire author Teddy Jones and her courageous approach to writing a novel that is both engaging and entertaining, but also serves as a call to action for today’s readers to stand up and speak out in the face of oppression, fear, and intimidation whenever certain groups act to repress the rights of others in an open and diverse society.In Making It Home, Jones is back with the intrepid and lovable West Texas family that consist of four generations of strong women, five if you count the long deceased matriarch mentioned in the opening pages. In the present story, which opens in 2014, Melanie Jackson Banks will discover a shameful family secret that’s hidden in an old diary that belonged to her grandmother. Male characters, whether they appear in the opening pages that take place in1920 or the contemporary story set between 2014 and 2015, are equally fascinating and multidimensional. The villain, Justin Reese, could easily be your former classmate, a neighbor, the husband of a woman you’ve seen with small kids who never looks you in the eye for fear of retribution from the man she married.Making It Home is the third installment in the Jackson’s Pond, Texas series. The first novel in the series was named a 2014 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Contemporary Fiction from Women Writing the West.What impresses me is the author’s ability to write from multiple viewpoints and maintain a seamless transition between characters and scenes. One of my favorite features in the novel is the inclusion of newspaper clippings dating from 1921 to present-day 2015. The news items add texture to the story and are interspersed between each chapter.The author is comfortable writing about contemporary life on a working ranch and the dynamics involved in keeping a small town alive in modern day America. Jones doesn’t shy away from adding romance into the lives of two of her octogenarian characters, Willa, the family matriarch and a visual artist, and Robert, a retired art professor who loves dogs and helping others.If you enjoy stories with an authentic sense of place and respect authors who have enough backbone to tackle even the toughest subjects making today’s headlines, you’ll want to check out Teddy Jones’s Making It Home. If you’re like me, you’ll be rooting for these characters so much that you’ll wish you could drive up to the ranch house, knock on the door, and be invited to join them at the table for hot coffee and a plate of shortbread cookies.A few harrowing chapters near the end kept me on the edge of my seat. I highly recommend this novel!And to heroine Melanie Jackson Banks and her creator, Ms. Teddy Jones, this saying is so fitting: "Nevertheless, She Persisted!"
