About Wood's A Place Called Sweet Shrub

Together for the first time as a classic Texas trilogy:

• The Train to Estelline
• A Place Called Sweet Shrub

The Lucinda “Lucy” Richards trilogy, spanning the years from 1911 to the 1930s, has everything good books should have: a variety of landscapes, characters of all ages and social classes, an overall tenderness that never lapses into sentimentality, and a sense of the comic amidst the tragic. Lucy is feisty, funny, and completely open-armed about life. Josh passionately confronts danger and greed and prejudice with courage and humor and, sometimes, with bare fists. Even the minor characters are so rife with color that you first turn the pages quickly to see what they will do next and, then, you turn them slowly so as to savor each page of this remarkable trilogy.

A Place Called Sweet Shrub:

In 1915 it has been three years since Lucy Richards left her teaching post in West Texas and returned home where she is busy being indispensable to her eccentric mother, keeping her Aunt Catherine comfortable, and taking on many of the chores her very pregnant sister no longer feels up to. She decides to choose a husband from the local beaus, but none of them stand a chance when handsome, irreverent Josh Arnold comes to town. The newlyweds move to the sleepy hamlet of Sweet Shrub, Arkansas, where they are soon caught up in the lives of their neighbors and discover that the surface tranquillity of the town hides simmering tensions and unrest that will inevitably result in tragedy.

“I could not put it down! Wood’s lively, eccentric characters leap off the page and will live in the reader’s heart long after the book is closed. Her prose is as strong and as graceful as the earlier times she portrays. A superb novel!” –—Actress Jean Stapleton

“This wholesome novel makes for easy, pleasant reading.” —Publishers Weekly

“A good page-turner becomes obsessively fascinating!… Wood makes us feel we are listening to conversations that took place years ago, but are as real as those we heard over lunch.” —Texarkana Gazette

“Pure enjoyment… A deceptively innocent little book about life in a small town and the dangers inherent in such. Most of all it is filled with fascinating individuals with… wonderful, eccentric natures.” —The Indianapolis Star

Second novel in a trilogy.