Square Dance

Set on the Blackland prairie of Texas in the early 1950s, Square Dance is the story of Homer Dillard, a cantankerous old man, and his eleven-year-old precocious and Bible-toting granddaughter, Gemma. They live together on a tumbledown chicken farm and sell eggs door to door in the nearby small town of Twilight. Dillard is eighty years old, left by his wife and by his daughter, Gemma's mother. Both have been abandoned, and their grudging loyalty to each other is at once fierce and touching. Incensed by Dillard's cussedness, Gemma finally packs up out of moral indignation and strikes off for the supposed glamour of Fort Worth, where her estranged mother lives a life of tawdry failure as a hairdresser. So begins Gemma's remarkable journey, and in telling it, Alan Hines has created a rich, touching, and funny novel about the pains of growing up and growing old.