Reading Recommendations: Oil Field Child, Estha Briscoe Stowe

"I was a pioneer oil field child, I grew up in the twenties and thirties with the westward progress of the Texas oil industry, moving with my parents from one Texas boomtown to another, Mexia, Wortham, Santa Rita, McCamey, Cranc, Wink, and Odessa, with a sojourn in Oklahoma for good measure. I never realized my life was different from that of the ordinary child until I was grown.

Countless other children like me inhabited boomtowns before schools, churches, sometimes even post offices were established. A good number of them were my friends at one time or another.

Pioneer oil field life has been depicted in fact, fiction, and movies with emphasis, always, on the lawless fringe element of the population, but I have never read a realistic story of a normal early day oil field family. That's why I'm telling my story."

Estha Briscoe Stowe From the Texas Bookshelves, Number Seven in the Chisholm Trail Series, Texas Christian University Press

Some Sing, Some Cry

From Reconstruction to both World Wars, from the Harlem Renaissance to Vietnam, from spirituals and arias to torch songs and the blues, Some Sing, Some Cry brings to life the monumental story of one American family's journey. From slavery into freedom, from country into city, from the past to the future, bright and blazing ahead. Real life sisters Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza achieve nothing more than a modern classic in this story of seven generations of women, and the men and music in their lives.

Opening dramatically at a sprawling plantation just off the South Carolina coast, recently emancipated slave Bette Mayfield quickly says her good-byes before fleeing for Charleston with her granddaughter, Eudora, in tow. She and Eudora carve out lives for themselves in the bustling port city as fortune teller and seamstress. Eudora marries and the Mayfield line grows and becomes an incredibly strong, musically, gifted family, a family that is led, protected and inspired by its women. Some Sing, Some Cry chronicles their astonishing passage through the watershed events of American history.Mixed Media Dollhouses

This book takes the artistic preparation of assemblage and collage and combines it with the long loved tradition of making doll houses, but these doll houses are anything but traditional! Begin with an artistic challenge between a group of talented friends, these mixed-media doll houses include beautiful castles, undersea fantasy-lands, gothic attics, inspiring tree houses, and much more. Authors Tally Oliveau and Julie Molina share both a host of interesting collage and alteration techniques while showing readers how to construct beautiful fantasy dollhouses. Readers learn how to re-purpose found boxes into rooms and houses, decorate interior surfaces, build miniature furnishings, make their own paper dolls, and embellish their houses using a variety of imaginative materials.

This is a beautiful book to thumb through. I loved it!

See you at Rylander!