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Critical Praise for The Mayor's Daughter

• The Mayor's Daughter is an American heartland saga with the power and elegance of a Greek tragedy combined with the rawness of a developing culture whose people are hardly more than a generation away from the wilderness. Hoggard sees into the depths of the human heart with unerring judgment and insight. We have here, in all their immediacy, soaring passions and breath-taking cruelty. Hoggard's world is both primitive and sophisticated, but the vision evoked by the narrative voices finally angles—with the courage and clarity of his lovely yet fiery title character—toward a hard-earned sense of justice and hope. The Mayor's Daughter gives us an extraordinarily powerful family drama.

  — Sarah Bird, author of The Yokota Officers Club and How Perfect is That

• An ordinary man becomes mayor and his wife is welcomed into society through no fault or effort of their own. In boom town West Texas, what is quickly won can be as quickly lost—especially if the mayor's daughter falls in love with an ordinary man whose mother runs a questionable boarding house. And there seems to be only one remedy. The Mayor's Daughter is big and grand, swirling around love that lives in pride, love that is selfishness in disguise, love that becomes hate, love that turns to death, love that will not let go.

  — Robert Flynn, author of Jade: Outlaw and Spur Award winners Wanderer Springs and Echoes of Glory

• Acclaimed novelist and poet James Hoggard brings his considerable narrative skills to bear in probing the destructive interactions within a rigid, father-knows-best family. Set in an oil field town in North Texas during the 1920s, the novel painstakingly explores the thrills and delights of an independent-minded girl's first love, her parents' unyielding and moralistic disapproval of her choice of a boy from a "common background," and the tragic consequences that follow.

  — Elroy Bode, author of In a Special Light and Home Country

Reviews

• Texas author shakes up age-old story—An insightful look at rigid parents, rebellious teen

  San Antonio Express-NewsAugust 28, 2011

  Texas author James Hoggard's new novel presents a story as old as people: Well-to-do parents have a troublesome daughter who has taken up with a lower-class fellow.

  Hoggard does more than just take this simple, oft-repeating dilemma and plant it in a particular time and place. Hoggard tells his version with dialogue that jumps off the page and with different narrative styles that construct a three-dimensional effect. Hoggard also infuses the story with thematic layers ranging from the matter of responsibility and the blurry line between certainty and ambiguity to the quirkiness of memory.

  Ru-Marie, short for Ruth-Marie, is the mayor's daughter, a high school student during 1924-25 in Kiowa Falls, Texas. Kiowa Falls is a poorly disguised fictional name for Wichita Falls, where the author lives and teaches at Midwestern State University.

  Ru-Marie is in love with Buster, a selfless and considerate boy who, though good at chemistry, drops out of high school to work at a refinery. Ru-Marie and Buster secretly marry in Oklahoma, and Buster wants to begin his bread-winning career early.

  Buster happens to be the son of a single mother who runs a boardinghouse. The city's upper-crust believes, wrongly, that the house is more like a brothel. The misconception causes Ru-Marie's parents to condemn their daughter's friend and forbid the relationship.

  The story rivets the readers attention when Buster tries to win Ru-Maries parents' favor by bringing them some fresh perch and catfish he has caught. The severity of the parents' hostility at the front door firmly sets up the novel's central conflict. The parents, who care nothing about their daughter's happiness, won't give the boy a chance.

  Hoggard begins the novel in epistolary style through a letter Ru-Marie has written to a journalist who is going to retell the events that unfolded long ago. At one point, a question-and-answer dialogue between the journalist and Ru-Marie advances the novel. Otherwise, the story alternates between first- and third-person narratives.

  The author adds realism to the novel by employing accurate Wichita Falls history, including street names and churches and buildings, some that no longer exist. The mayor is portrayed as a puppet to the city's businessmen.

  Hoggard ties the characters to the land and the weather. The descriptions of hardpan red dirt covered by straw-colored fingers of grass characterize the people, their nature further sharpened by sudden, harsh cold fronts.

  "That may have helped us, that hardness," Ru-Marie observes.

  The dysfunction in Ru-Marie's family is extreme.

  Anyone who has raised teenagers understands how language can become powerful weapons. Hoggard's dialogue stabs and draws blood. Ru-Marie has to navigate the tricky boundary between certainty and ambiguity in what she tells her parents. After the story reaches its climax, the matter of responsibility must be sorted. Did God cause the trouble? Was the time and place a factor?

  The story may be simple, but readers quickly will realize they have a sensitive, complex and insightful work of art on their hands, along with a disarming message about humanity.

  _______________________
  David Hendricks is an Express- News business writer and columnist.

• A Texas tale of love and family

  Dallas Morning NewsSept. 11, 2011

  Reviewed by Si Dunn

  Set in North Texas in the mid-1920s, James Hoggard's beautifully written family drama begins with a simple and familiar premise: An artistic, intelligent young woman still in high school falls in love with a young man who has dropped out to work at an oil refinery. Her parents consider him far beneath their daughter.

  The young man, Buster Lopreis, has no father, the parents point out, and his mother runs a boardinghouse of questionable repute, where men and women both live under the same roof.

  When the young woman, Ru-Marie Coleman, tries to establish her independence and continue her relationship with Buster, her parents respond by escalating their efforts to break them up. Buster keeps trying to win Ru-Marie's parents over, even though they call him "the problem" and refuse to say his name.

  From there, the story's tensions gradually build, until events finally spiral out of control and two families are ripped apart.

  Along with love and hate, Hoggard's engrossing tale delves into "the airs of superiority" that people who grew up in poverty can take on once they become financially successful or at least reasonably well off.

  Ru-Marie's father, Jeff Coleman, owns a sporting-goods store in a burgeoning North Texas town known as Kiowa Falls. (It bears possible resemblance to Wichita Falls, where the author is an English professor at Midwestern State University.) Coleman also has become Kiowa Falls' mayor, with help from wealthy backers to whom he now owes allegiance.

  The irony in Jeff and Eileen Coleman's expanding hatred of Buster is that "the problem" is almost a mirror image of who they used to be. The mayor grew up poor, without a father, living in a boardinghouse. His wife grew up in a boardinghouse, as well. Now that they have been welcomed into their town's society, one of their greatest concerns is what other people might say about them. Eileen stays obsessed with what's acceptable for her daughter.

  "He's trash, Ru-Marie, just trash, and what will people think?" Eileen says during one of their many arguments over Buster.

  At one point, Ru-Marie complains to Buster about her father: "He won't ever say it—I don't even think he dares think it—but it crazes him to no end to think if I keep going around with you, I'll end up p.g. [pregnant]—their damn silly term—and me somehow his surrogate, back in the same, impossible poverty he thinks he grew up in." Buster responds by urging her not to be hard on her parents. And he remains hopeful he can change their opinions of him.

  The novel takes on increasingly darker tones as it delves into secret marriage and one other aspect of early 20th-century North Texas life: lingering tolerance of frontier justice in a city rapidly growing and modernizing.

  With this book, Hoggard, author of 19 other works, including novels, short-story collections, poetry and translations, demonstrates once again that he is a masterful storyteller worthy of his many writing awards.

  ________
  Former North Texas resident Si Dunn's latest book is Erwin's Law, a novel set in Austin.