A Family of Good Women, an intriguing novel by Teddy Jones, takes place in the 1920s oil boomtown of Borger, Texas.

Imogene Good, 23, still grieves her mother’s death. Imogene works hard at the boarding house she inherited from her mother. She cooks three meals a day and furnishes a sack lunch for the night-shift workers. It’s a rough town filled with mostly tough, hard-working men. Although Imogene graduated from teaching college and longs to teach, she feels obligated to continue with the boarding house.

Imogene takes in a runaway cousin, Sue Ellen, from the Good family farm in East Texas, a young woman who has a bad reputation. The two women come to an understanding and both toil endlessly at the never-ending work of a boarding house filled with tough, hungry oil workers. Most men appreciate the women’s efforts, but there’s one mean boarder who threatens violence.

When Imogene finds a journal in her mother’s trunk, she learns the history of her family of women and children, an extended family that strangely lacks men. As a child, she took their existence for granted, but in reading her family history, many questions of her childhood are answered. Imogene and Sue Ellen are able to piece together family issues and lingering mysteries.

When violence strikes home, the two women learn who their friends really are. Almost too late, Imogene learns what one man’s relationship, a Texas Ranger, means to her.

A Family of Good Women is an excellent novel, packed with realistic scenes of rough oil boom towns of the 1920s. The existence of Good women is based on fact, and this novel brings their story to life.