**2018 Beverly Hills Book Award Winner for Historical Fiction/Southwest!**Best of Texas Book Award Winner for Historical Fiction!Times are hard along the Sabine River, and the little East Texas town of Ashland is crumbling under the weight of the Great Depression. Families are broke and hungry. For many, their last meal may well have been their last meal. Families are giving up and leaving town. … and leaving town. Everyone knows the fate that awaits the scattered farms. No one can save Ashland. It is as isolated as the back side of a blue moon.
Into town comes Doc Bannister wearing a straw boater and a white suit. He is the miracle man. He has a homemade doodlebug machine that, he says, can find oil and make them all rich. Oil, he swears, lies beneath the blistered farmstead of Eudora Durant. She thinks Doc is a flim flam man. The Sheriff believes he is a con artist. Both are convinced that Doc has come to town to swindle every dime he can get before hitting the road again. Ashland knows Doc may be crooked, but he has brought hope to a town that had no hope.
Eudora has everything Doc wants. She is a beautiful woman who owns cheap land. In Ashland, she is known as the scarlet woman. Whispers say she murdered her husband. No one has seen him since the night they heard a shotgun blast on her farm. The town wants oil. Doc wants Eudora. But Eudora is too independent and stubborn to fall for the charms of a silver-tongued charlatan.
She holds the fate of Ashland in her hands. Will she let Doc drill? Is there really oil lying deep beneath her sun-baked land? Can Doc find it? Or is he more interested in finding love than oil? What happens when a man with a checkered past comes face to face with a woman whose past is as mysterious as his?
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Back Side of a Blue Moon is the first novel of Caleb Pirtle’s Book Town Saga and the first of Pirtle’s many novels I’ve read. It won’t be my last. This was a terrific read, which for me was reminiscent of Faulkner, Steinbeck, even Caldwell, but not only because it deals with the lower echelons of society who suffer extreme poverty or because it takes place in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. Pirtle flashes plenty of brilliance in this novel. Not only does he display exceptional writing skill and exquisite storytelling talent, but he grabs readers by the collar, pulls them in on the first page, and holds them tightly all the way to the end.
Pirtle’s characters feel real, despite (or because of) their quirks, attitudes, and ability to carry on against all odds. We are thrown into the midst of a dried up, hopeless, all-but-dead small town in West Texas, the appropriately named, Ashland. The town and the novel are populated by a wide range of characters, some good some pure evil. Our experience among them includes sights, sounds, even smells that envelope the reader. I was there with them the whole time. Pirtle doesn’t sugarcoat it. What he shows us is the real, underbelly of a hard life during hard times. And he makes it compelling. Not easy to do, but he has the craftsmanship and sensitivity to pull it off.
Although it isn’t evident right away, at its core Back Side of a Blue Moon is a love story. Eudora Durant, a beautiful, feisty young woman is the victim of an abusive husband. You’ll hate him. Doc Bannister (if that’s really his name) is a huckster, a flim-flam man, who arrives in Ashland with a scheme to suck what money the people have from them and to split town before he can be exposed. An unlikely pair of lovers to be sure, but we can’t help rooting for them all the way. Will they make it? Will Doc’s scam actually pay off? Will the people of Ashland, especially Eudora, be left in the dust, literally?
Back Side of the Moon is a great read. My adventure getting my hands dirty and my emotions sapped on the outskirts of a dying West Texas town is still vivid to me. I’m not going to reveal the surprise ending. You’ll have to find out for yourself.
I had read a book in a different series by Caleb Pirtle and I enjoyed it so much, I jumped on the next book I came across, in a different series, not realizing I was reading the books out of order. When I made my discovery, I was too hooked on “Bad Side of a Wicked Moon” to put it down. I loved it, reviewed it, and went on to book one, “Back Side of a Blue Moon.” I have now read all three books in the series, and I’m hoping for more.
In the first book in the series, “Back Side of a Blue Moon,” we are introduced to a population of worn-down folks in East Texas who are being systematically destroyed by the Great Depression, while the brutal drought is hellbent on destroying the earth beneath their feet. But the characters themselves are some of the most colorful, quirky and vivid portraits of survivors I’ve ever come across. They stand up to fate out of habit, since their pride is about the only thing they have left. Until, that is, a flimflam man named Doc Bannister and his faithful sidekick Waskom Brown wander into town and proclaim there is a river of oil beneath their desiccated farmland and they are all soon going to be rich beyond their wildest dreams.
While the characters are interesting and colorful enough to carry the story, there’s actually a strong mystery element that kept me guessing and off-balance. I felt like the author was stringing me along, keeping me in suspense as he wove this intricate story to a very satisfying end. But it isn’t the end; it’s just the end of the first installment in this wonderful captivating series. Highly recommend!
Powerful and Unforgettable
Everyone knew lovely red-headed Eudora Durant had killed her husband. He abused her regularly. He spent more time with prostitutes than he did with her. He left her plowing behind the mules and tending the farm while he drank and slept with “whores.”
It was the 1930s in Texas and conditions were harsh and unforgiving for women, sinners, farmers, and anyone calling Ashland home—and with bank foreclosures and businesses shuttering their windows—the population continued to shrink as the town died.
If the women’s gossip corner—most of them church-goers—held a trial, Eudora would be found guilty of her husband’s murder. She was beautiful, and the sheriff’s wife hated her. But the sheriff could not find Washburn Durant’s body, so he couldn’t charge her with murder.
Doc Bannister and his business partner Waskom Brown were on the run from con to con when they paused in Ashland with an improvised “doodlebug” made out of an old radio and rusted dials. He told folks it would find oil and sold shares in the well he planned to dig on Eudora Durant’s land.
The judge and sheriff wanted Doc and Waskom gone. Waskom was black. The 1930s were an unforgiving decade for blacks—and Doc was equally unwelcome because he was a stranger and a con man. Besides, the judge wanted to marry Widow Durant and tolerated no competition.
Dysfunctional folks and lifestyles combined like dynamite and blew the cover off miracles when Ashland’s populace put aside drought, crop failure, and bitter grievances to work together in a unity that ignited the back side of the blue moon.
Unique, historical, gut-wrenching.