Hug Dancing

With wit and feeling Shelby Hearon takes us into the life and world of Cile Tait, age thirty-nine, of Waco, Texas. A woman of charm and integrity, she summons up the courage to burn her bridges and defect from her marriage to the Grace Presbyterian Church’s minister, only to be stunned by the complete lack of flame, smoke or hubbub of any kind that follows.

Here is an inner-directed, sensuous, self-liberated woman impelled to make a place for herself in a society where church-centered propriety (embodied in her preacher-husband, whose constricting bed and board she leaves) mingles with country-style macho (in the person of Andy, her long-lost high school sweetheart and hug-dancing partner, who resurfaces and reclaims her)… and with the eternal Dallas dash (Andy’s bandbox-stylish wife). It is a new world where superconducting supercolliders, threatening famlands, have brought into the area a global mix of superscientists (including the beautiful Korean who may be moving toward the marriage Cile has vacated), where the rumble of money appears to underlie almost every mysterious action and where Cile’s two daughters, young Amazons with a passion to save the world from exological disaster, are already charting their own independent courses.

Yet the more things change, the more they are destined to repeat the past. So it goes in Shelby Hearon’s wickedly observant novel, whose convolutions, through three months from Wind Day to Earth Day, trace the amazing course of true love à la 1990s.