The Mayor's Daughter

July 1, 2011
In the 1920s, a murder rocks a small Texas town, and many years later a woman relates the story to one John Evening, who is writing about the event. The place is Kiowa Falls, booming thanks to oil. There, artistic high-schooler Ru-Marie Coleman falls in love with Buster Lopreis. Her parents, proud of their standing in the community (her father is the mayor), are vehemently opposed to Buster, whom they consider to be from the wrong side of the tracks because his mother runs a boardinghouse. The battle between Ru-Marie and her parents intensifies when she and Buster run off to get married. Hoggard uses a variety of strategies to build up to his violent climax, combining straightforward narrative with what Ru-Marie conveys to John Evening through interviews. As a girl, she often comes across as a brat, making it hard for readers to relate to her. But Hoggard does a convincing job of showing how the thin veneer of civilization in Kiowa Falls barely obscures the roughness of the frontier. Recommend this atmospheric tale to readers of Larry Watson's Montana 1948 (1993).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)