“To find ourselves, we may first have to get lost. The remarkable Teddy Jones is a storyteller at the top of her game, writing about familial chaos and shattered dreams, about abandonment and grief, about one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world. There is so much to admire in this wise and luminous novel. Marva Cope is written with abiding tenderness and compassion. I started reading slowly, and so will you, hoping the novel would never end, hoping I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to Marva, Violet, Carol, and Chick. I’m not even going to tell you about Bullet. Don’t want to break your heart.” John Dufresne author of Storyville
Marva Cope, the fourth novel in the Jackson’s Pond, Texas Series, brings new elements to the story of the small town in the Texas Panhandle, Jackson’s Pond. In addition to some familiar members of the Jackson family, other members of the community inhabit this tale that revolves around a new arrival, Marva Cope. She arrives in June, 2017 as the new Postmaster. Single and fifty-five, Marva has an ally in her Aunt Violet, a long-time resident of Jackson’s Pond. Although they haven’t seen one another in years, Marva and her feisty seventy-nine-year- old aunt become housemates, “at least for now.” It’s not as if Marva’s a new sheriff in a frontier town; no one is hostile. In fact, some see her as an improvement over the previous Postmaster. But Marva knows that the life she’s led to this point has kept her alone and often lonely. It’s up to her to figure out how to change that. Maybe Jackson’s Pond could be a home where she can belong. Change for Marva doesn’t come easily. Only when she overcomes her worst enemy, her own stubborn hesitance to open herself to others, does she accept that she can and does now have friends. It’s then that she’s willing to consider what to do with the rest of her life.
Midtown Publishing, Inc. February, 2023
267 pages
ISBN 13: 978-1-62677-037-9