


Marva Cope, the fourth novel in the Jackson’s Pond, Texas Series, brings new elements to the story of the small town in the Texas Panhandle.
Marva arrives as the new postmaster in 2017. She brings with her a lifetime of hesitancy to open herself to others. It is here, while living with her elder Aunt Violet, that she comes to appreciate the value of true friendships. With new relationships, long walks, and conversations with herself, she comes to terms with her difficult past…the loss of a beloved teenaged brother in a tragic farm accident, her father’s death from a broken heart, and a distant mother who had no love for the young teenager.
Troubled teenage years followed as a flawed young man lures her to New Mexico, then left her alone with their newborn daughter. With her newfound courage of trusting others as friends, she reconnects with her daughter and a college dorm-mate she had deserted in years past. In Jackson’s Pond, she finds the ability to consider what to do with the rest of her life.

The book starts with Marva moving in with her Aunt Violet in the small town of Jackson’s Pond, Texas. We get Marva’s story in flashbacks and conversations, over games of Scrabble with Aunt Violet, in Marva’s internal thoughts as she takes her walks around town.
Growing up, Marva Cope is a pretty average teenager. Trying to make it through school. Getting her older brother Chance to take her for a drive. But when Chance is killed in a freak accident on their farm, life changes. Marva struggles with his death and with feeling like it was somehow her fault. Her father sinks deeper into depression. Her mother is bitter, and nothing Marva does ever measures up. She heads off to college when she graduates high school and never looks back, and she leaves home a bit of a loner, reliant on herself and not one to ask for or expect help. Life has taught her not to expect much from other people.
Against the advice of her dorm-mate (and the closest thing to a friend Marva has), Marva leaves school and follows a cowboy out on the open road, going where life takes them. When she finds herself a single mother, left high and dry by that cowboy to manage a ranch on her own, she knows something has to change. She is slowly beginning to realize that perhaps other people can have her best interests at heart, and she hopes Violet will take her in, at least until she gets back on her feet.
This is a wonderful story! It seems weird to call it a “coming of age” story, since Marva is in her fifties, but it really is. Life and time formed Marva’s perspective, and it took more life and more time to shift that viewpoint. Age is no indicator of maturity or wisdom, and it takes Marva a little extra time to learn some important lessons.
Teddy Jones writes some delightful characters. There are a handful of lesser characters that aren’t real likable (and I include Marva’s mother in this bunch, because she isn’t terribly involved in the story once Marva leaves home), but almost all of the ones I think of as main characters, even with their flaws, have something about them to like. Other than Marva, I think Aunt Violet is my favorite. She’s a lot like Marva, very independent and a little unconventional. I love that she’s a Scrabble fiend! I would totally sit down and play with her, and I think it would be a heck of a game.
I found it interesting that Marva felt like she didn’t remember a lot of things in her life that maybe she should have. I’ve felt that way before. There are big swaths of life where I know things happened, life went on day to day, but I couldn’t give you any details. I like the way Jones has Stacey, Marva’s former dorm-mate who she gets reacquainted with, explain that feeling: “I think it’s because we don’t remember the chronology of our lives, we remember events. I don’t only mean events in the typical sense, like a big party, a graduation, a birth, but also interpersonal things that were BIG to us for a reason.” She goes on to say, “Maybe we’re all that way. The day-to-day disappears pretty quickly, the things that hurt us last a long time.” That makes sense to me, although I hope the things that help us and heal us make a lasting impression, too.
The ending of the story isn’t all tied up neatly with a bow. It’s a little bit of an open ending, and it’s left to the reader to imagine what may come next for Marva. I’m curious to see what unfolds next in Jackson’s Pond! I’m also curious to read the first three books in the series to see whether we learn more about Marva’s family or whether the focus is on other residents of the town.
I highly recommend Marva Cope for anyone who loves a good story about a wanderer finding her way home.


Teddy Jones is the author of five published novels, as well as a collection of short stories. Her short fiction received the Gold Medal First Prize in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition in 2015. Jackson’s Pond, Texas was a finalist for the 2014 Willa Award in contemporary fiction from Women Writing the West. Her novel, Making It Home, was a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition in 2017 and A Good Family (not yet unpublished) was named finalist in that contest in 2018.
Although her fiction tends to be set in West Texas, her characters’ lives embody issues not bounded by geography of any particular region. Families and loners; communities in flux; people struggling, others successful; some folks satisfied in solitude and others yearning for connection populate her work. And they all have in common that they are more human than otherwise.
Jones grew up in a small Texas town, Iowa Park. Earlier she worked as a nurse, a nurse educator, a nursing college administrator, and as a nurse practitioner in Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. For the past twenty years, she and her husband have lived in the rural West Texas Panhandle where he farms and she writes.

03/07/23 |
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03/07/23 |
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03/08/23 |
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03/09/23 |
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03/09/23 |
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03/10/23 |
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03/11/23 |
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03/12/23 |
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03/13/23 |
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03/14/23 |
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03/14/23 |
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03/15/23 |
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03/15/23 |
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03/16/23 |
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03/16/23 |
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Ooh! I learned a lot more about the story from your marvelous (MARVAlous?) review. It sounds like it has a lot of depth and things to ponder. Love it. Thanks for sharing your thoughs.