Product Description

"Hines writes lovingly and convincingly about rural Texas, creating a strong sense of place and some wonderfully complex characters."

--Publishers Weekly

Set on the Blackland prairie of Texas in the early 1950s, Square Dance is the story of Homer Dillard, a cantankerous old man, and his eleven-year-old precocious and Bible-toting granddaughter, Gemma. They live together on a tumbledown chicken farm and sell eggs door to door in the nearby small town of Twilight. Dillard is eighty years old, left by his wife and by his daughter, Gemma's mother. Both have been abandoned, and their grudging loyalty to each other is at once fierce and touching. Incensed by Dillard's cussedness, Gemma finally packs up out of moral indignation and strikes off for the supposed glamour of Fort Worth, where her estranged mother lives a life of tawdry failure as a hairdresser.

So begins Gemma's remarkable journey, and in telling it Alan Hines has created a rich, touching, and funny novel about the pains of growing up and growing old.

Review

FROM KIRKUS REVIEW

Gemma Dillard is eleven in 1951, abandoned by her trampy mother Juanelle to live with Juanelle's old father Homer on a ramshackle chicken farm outside Twilight, Texas. They get on smoothly enough: Gemma, bright and willful and devout, drives grandpa Homer to the lake to fish, keeps his egg-business accounts, and reads the Bible; the old man, mostly blind and very stubborn, gives the girl the opportunity (welcome to both) to boss him about. But when an old black man named Beecham is accidentally buried alive in the town dump, and when the search for him is called off, Homer (a childhood friend of Beecham's) shows no initiative in restarting it--to Gemma's dismay. So she packs up out of moral indignation and strikes off for Fort Worth and her mother, whose life in the city is a tawdry failure: Juanelle is now married to a gas-station owner who's in the process of being bilked in an oil-well deal (by the owner of the hair salon where Juanelle works). Then twelve-year-old Gemma falls in love with--and is absurdly engaged to--a retarded 25-year-old retarded man, Rory. And finally, after finding Rory in flagrante with one of her mother's fellow hairdressers, Gemma flees back to Homer and Twilight--where Beecham has been resurrected: Homer finally dug him out after all--a neat final fit that's a little saccharine. First-novelist Hines frames the book with excitingly written elements, especially two sequences of burial: Beecham's trash interment at the start of the novel; Homer's in a vividly described tornado after Gemma returns. An early-on scene of Gemma driving is both funny and memorably odd: she's seated on a washtub so that she can see over the steering wheel, with Homer actually perched out on the hood with a flashlight to guide the headlampless jalopy's progress through the dusk. And though the book loses some momentum in the Fort Worth interlude, it is everywhere finely, smartly tooled: a good introduction to a writer of talent.

--Kirkus Review (starred)

"An artful first novel that turns on solid, memorable characters and a well-sculpted plot."

--Newsday

"A carefully wrought book, with firmly drawn characters and a richly realized sense of time and place that recall both setting and themes ofMcCullers' A Member of the Wedding and Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird."

--ALA Booklist

"A born spellbinder. Comparisons withTo Kill a Mockingbird, A Member of the Wedding and other Southern writing perhaps are inevitable. But Square Dance demonstrates that Alan Hines is blazing his own path into contemporary fiction."

--Dallas Morning News

Square Dance
is far removed from the kind of strange humour we have come to associate with the South.  ...There is a sense of authorial freedom here, an awareness of a literary heritance that is no longer stifling.

--Times Literary Supplement

"A finely crafted work that proves Hines knows his south as wel