Shelby Hearon

Shelby Hearon's excellent twelfth novel opens, ""And they lived happily ever after."" It ends, ""Once upon a time."" The opening and closing lines echo many of the themes of the novel. The book opens with Cile Tate leaving her Presbyterian preacher husband to return to the early love of her life, Drew Williams. When Cile decides to leave Eben Tate, she is amazed that he announces her abandonment of him and their two daughters from his pulpit. All this makes Cile a fallen woman in the eyes of the church members and the citizens of Waco, the bastion of Baptist religion in Texas. The title reflects one of the Baptist tenets that is so often satirized - that hug dancing is a prelude to fornication. Cile and Drew are hug dancing in a serious way. Drew's mother, Lila Beth, introduces Cile to his socialite wife, Mary Virginia. It is through Lila Beth that Cile and Drew resume the love they knew as young people. The novel begins almost at the end and then twists back and forth over the three months it takes for Cile and Drew, once teenaged hug dancers, to find a way to ""live happily ever after.

The Second Dune, Shelby Hearon's second novel, was published in 1973 and won the Texas Institute of Letters Award as the best book of fiction of the year. Written when Hearon was forty-three and just before her divorce, the novel is seen from the point of view of suburban housewives and their mothers and daughters. Ellen Marshall, divorced and remarried, is troubled by her son's refusal to accept her second husband, but takes great comfort from the five-year old daughter of her second marriage. She hopes to be able to pass on to her daughter some of the knowledge that only women possess and to help little Ellen see that women need to break the bonds that society has forced upon them. As the narrator says early in the novel, "Raised by women, schooled by women, we who are mothers now were taught to look across the gulf to men and count ourselves as they counted us." Ellen hopes her daughter will be different just as she is slowly becoming different herself.