Stormy Weather audiobook

This is a beautifully written book even if the place (Texas during the drought-plagued Depression) and surroundings (wildcat oil fields and a family’s broken down farm house) were not. The lush language transported me to a place where I heard the sounds of wind, oil rigs, broken down trucks, town dances and lecturing traveling nurses, as if I were in the room. And the images Ms Jiles captured were as clear as the Panavision movie shorts shown before the occasional Saturday picture show watched by the Stoddard girls. One family— three daughters and a whole lot of heartache, poverty and hopeful humanity. Making do and wanting more. Sibling rivalry and sibling solidarity. The short-comings of sometimes loving but always imperfect parents. And the people who touch that family’s life— for better or worse. Historical fiction at its very best. The Texas dust bowl years are vividly and vibrantly brought to life on the written page.I caught some flavoring of William Faulkner — family tragedies and bad luck, but this story is hopeful where Faulkner is usually just tragic. I look forward to reading more of this author’s work. Sheer poetry at times.

This is the first book in a long time that I couldn't put down and day-dreamed about almost every moment that I wasn't able to read it. Author Paulette Jiles drops you into a different time and place with wonderful, precise detail that I thoroughly enjoyed. I will also be thinking about the Texas-style romance between main characters Jeanine and Ross for some time to come--it's so restrained yet filled with the kind of just-under-the-surface passion that plants deep roots into one's imagination. I'm definitely having book withdrawals from this one....

A believable story of one family's survival of the Great Depression in Texas. The characters are captivating and ones that you can really like. The author takes us through dust storms, into hot, dusty, cotton fields, poverty, the people trying to overcome it, triumphs and tragedy, among it the awakenings of love. It’s all here in this saga. While there isn't a "plot" in the traditional sense... it's a powerful story that takes you into the era so you feel as though you are living it with the characters, and it makes us modern people very glad that we aren’t. What I appreciated most was that Jiles is dealing with the lives of ordinary people as they strive to survive and prosper in harsh conditions, always facing the threat of poverty and starvation. The book is a little slow, but overall, very good.

What a lovely, lovely book. Paulette Jiles beautifully evokes Depression-era America in Dustbowl Texas, witnessed through the lives of four women—a mother and her three wonderfully compelling daughters. As she illuminates the desperation of families struggling with poverty and deprivation, she also captures the bonds of community, friendship, and family that helped them through such terrible times. If you like historical fiction on an intimate, personal scale, a novel that transcends typical "women's fiction," you should give Stormy Weather a try.

A sort of female Grapes of Wrath, this is a story of deep, unrelenting poverty and the daily struggle for survival during the depression and dustbowl years. After a nomadic lifestyle with a hard-drinking, heavy-gambling father; Jeannie, her mother and two sisters return to their deserted, run-down ancestoral Texas ranch after his death. Jeannie, at the age of 20, takes on the challenge of scraping a life from the hard-baked earth and unrelenting drought, as she tries to figure out what her own future holds.I enjoyed the prose-style which is sparse and direct. It complimented the frugality and pragmatic nature of the times. No waste, no excess, and no need for flowery sentimentality, these were hard times and most people didn't mess around but said what they meant, worked hard, and had little. The prose let me feel rather than read about the chemistry between Ross and Jeannie, the guilt and fraility of Elizabeth (the mother), the longing of Mayme, and the drive pushing Jeannie. It was really an involving story and a fascinating peak into the lives of Americans during a very distant,unique time in the American economy...Hmm..wait a minute; global warming-hurricanes, floods, major snowstorms; the housing crisis, recessions, falling markets...maybe not so unique and distant after all. Ah, if only I had a crazy race horse and shares in a wildcat oil well!

Paulette Jiles is in a league of her own. I am quickly devouring her entire backlist, and her lyricism and plot structure never fail to entrance my mind. I read her paragraphs two or three times just to savor the language. I am afraid I am ruined for other books.

Excellent story and brilliant narration BT Colleen Delaney!

“Events come about in chains. People die without warning. Droughts settle on the country and become fixed and will not move on. Without warning, a boy starts turning into a man. Nothing you did yourself or failed to do. He stared i to the design of the fire. The wind fluted at the edges of the roof and at the windowpanes in a wandering series of tones. In the stanzas of the wind’s singing he could hear voices from a past time, and they were hard voices, for this was a hard country and they were living in hard times.”Stormy Weather is a story about a family in the dust storms and oilfields of Texas during the Depression. The father is a gambler who drinks and carouses with women until he dies suddenly in a scandal. The mother dreams of her childhood home and an oil well coming in. She has three daughters to raise and when they run out of money, they go back to her parent’s home which was abandoned and left derelict when he parents died. The story is principally about the middle daughter, Jeanine, who takes on the task of bringing the old house and ranch back to life, while the older daughter, Mayme, dreams of marrying and the younger one, Bea, dreams of writing for magazines.“They began to make their lives there, throughout the fall of 1937. They tried to piece their lives together the way people draw maps of remembered places; they get things wrong and out of proportion, they erase and redraw again.”Jeanine has the grit to pull this off, and everyone pitches in with their own gifts, but there are accidents and most of all the unrelenting times of poverty, drought and dust storms.“When her father was arrested, Bea understood that there were unknown depths to which people could fall, when all the structures of the world came loose, the framework gave way. When, like the king, you abdicated.” This understanding is a pre-figuring.Even though the girls are angry with their father for the way he brought scandal into their lives, they are also grieving his loss.“They all missed him and nobody would say so. The sisters needed him to drive nails and change the tires and to tell them what kind of man to look for in life, to say Don’t marry somebody like me. To explain why Roosevelt had stored all the gold in Fort Knox. But he was so irrevocably gone.”Two men pursue Jeanine and she must figure out for herself what kind of man she wants to marry. In the end, I think she makes the right choice.Jiles is a terrific writer, as gifted with descriptive prose as with dialog that sounds too authentic to be imagined. This may be a well known expression, because it seemed so true to the time and place, but I had never heard it used before, and it made me laugh: “She’s mad enough to eat bees.”I give this 4.5 stars with only a bit taken off because it seemed slow to start. However, once roped in, like the ranch animals being sheared, I gave in.

For those who have read and liked Paulette Jiles' "News of the World," it is worth looking back at some of her earlier works, "Stormy Weather" being a good one to pick up. The action takes places during the '30s dust bowl in Texas and concerns the Stoddard family, a mother and three daughters whose stars are hitched to Jack Stoddard, a handsome gambler, drinker and womanizer, who earns his keep by transporting and installing equipment used in the burgeoning oil business. Their struggles takes us deep into the economics of poverty and deprivation. The two oldest girls, Mayme and Jeanine, the father's favorite and main protagonist of the story, take their few dollars into the store at Strawn's crossroads and are confronted with the realities of their situation. "They now knew what was in store for them. A can of trouble, a pound of misery, yards and yards of work to shore that old place up again." Elizabeth, their mother, is as plucky as her three daughters, as is Bea, the youngest, a would-be writer who never goes anywhere without her Big Chief. The family is working against the dust, the drought and the Depressions. In "Stormy Weather" we get to see all three firsthand. Elizabeth wonders when young women started wearing Levis around the house. Having two large gangling girls who were her daughters was one more confusing event like adultery, widowhood, and the financial collapse of the United States. The book introduces a number of important secondary characters: Ross Everett, who at 19, already knows a good deal when he sees it and this turns out to be Jeanine. But there is also Milt Brown, the would-be radio announcer with a stutter who courts the reader while amusing Jeanine with his humorous self-deprecation. Jiles provides us with a history lesson in detail and language, much of the vernacular is amusing as in one mother's exclamation that her daughter was "headed for the lakes of fire" with her loose talk. Or that Jeanine should be careful hiring a certain family to work her homestead: "The way they cus would make your nose bleed."

Stormy Weather is the follow-up novel to Paulette Jiles’ wildly popular and critically acclaimed first novel, Enemy Women. With it, she proves, without a doubt, that her writing has staying power. Stormy Weather is the story of Jeanine Stoddard, her sisters, and their mother. Deserted and humiliated by their mercurial father and husband, Jack Stoddard, the women must negotiate the uncharted world of East and Central Texas during the Great Depression. Jeanine, the middle-child, skinny and fierce, leads her mother and sisters out of the oil fields and back to the abandoned Tolliver farm of her mother’s childhood. There, they struggle to survive drought, dust storms, back taxes, injury, and the stigma of poverty. But while the Great Depression and its hardships are common fodder for fiction, Jiles’ story of rough and tumble East Texas, its oil fields, its illegal horse racing, and its unforgettable characters is fresh enough. Her prose, too, is vital, sweeping over vast distances in time and space at one moment, and honing into focus on a single scene the next. It is difficult to shake certain images in this book, such as the blind man who helps Jeanine load her drunken father into the family jalopy. Or the moment she catches her neck-scarf in the gearbox of an ancient tractor. The scene with Jeanine’s sister Bea at the well is transfixing, and the night Jeanine last speaks to her father in the family shed is also haunting. The one problem with this novel might be the end. It cannot be said that Jeanine and her family do not undergo hardship in this story; however, I am wary of stories that end too well. They seem unlikely. And while Jiles does try to temper this fortune, it still smacks a little of Hollywood. Nonetheless, Stormy Weather will lead you by the nose. A great read.

I really enjoyed this book. I can't remember exactly but one of the quotations on the back said something to the effect of, this book is a view of the past but it is NOT sepia-toned. I loved this book because it felt so real. The desperation of the Great Depression and dust bowl out in rural texas felt so palpable. And it was because the desperation felt so real that I completely related to their fears and anxieties. Especially how once things got better, they were so scared to let go of what they had scraped together to build. I just really cared about the characters and I felt transported to that time.