Hug Dancing Book

Shelby Hearon's excellent twelfth novel opens, "And they lived happily ever after." It ends, "Once upon a time." The opening and closing lines echo many of the themes of the novel. The book opens with Cile Tate leaving her Presbyterian preacher husband to return to the early love of her life, Drew Williams.

When Cile decides to leave Eben Tate, she is amazed that he announces her abandonment of him and their two daughters from his pulpit. All this makes Cile a fallen woman in the eyes of the church members and the citizens of Waco, the bastion of Baptist religion in Texas.

The title reflects one of the Baptist tenets that is so often satirized-that hug dancing is a prelude to fornication. Cile and Drew are hug dancing in a serious way.

Drew's mother, Lila Beth, introduces Cile to his socialite wife, Mary Virginia. It is through Lila Beth that Cile and Drew resume the love they knew as young people.

The novel begins almost at the end and then twists back and forth over the three months it takes for Cile and Drew, once teenaged hug dancers, to find a way to "live happily ever after."

Publishers Weekly

Hearon's delightful 12th novel, after Owning Jolene , is a racy, realistic romance that follows Cile Tait, a parson's wife in Waco, Tex., on the road to happily-ever-after with her reclaimed high-school sweetheart. After they discover that they're still in love with each other while waltzing together at the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds, Cile and Drew Williams determine to wait three years, until her two daughters and his two sons are in high school, before she leaves her dour husband, Eben, and he his wealthy wife from Dallas, Mary Virginia. But after Cile tells Eben, who announces her imminent departure from his pulpit and who, she learns, is involved with a female congregant, Drew seems to hesitate. Cile finds out that the land values on his grandfather's farm, where they expected to live, are at issue, and that his mother and wife are planning to throw him a lavish 40th birthday party. Cile continues with her claims for independence, calling upon her father, from whom she's been estranged since her mother's death 20 years earlier. Hearon's tricky, credible resolution involves Cile's and Drew's children, engaging teenagers full of surprises; additional knowledge about her mother's death; and a reconciliation with Drew's mother. A lively and accomplished turn around the dance floor. Author tour. (Nov.)