Calico Canyon

When I got Calico Canyon in the mail, my first thought was, ‘Oh that looks like a ‘cute book’. I vastly underestimated this story! A friend of mine got the chance to read the story before I was able to pick up my copy, she was bursting at the seams wanting to tell me about it! Every time I looked over at her while she was reading it, she had this goofy grin on her face and was stifling laughter. Now I know why.

Calico Canyon is likely one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time! I’ve had a pretty busy and draining couple of months, and this story brought a much needed smile to my face and had me almost crying in laughter.

Grace Calhoun a smart and bright girl is running from an abusive past, and finds her self running a school in a tiny Texas town. Five young terrors from the same family make her life miserable, by pulling the sort of pranks teachers have nightmares about. It doesn’t help their father, Daniel Reeves, seems to be a dull witted gruff man, who obviously doesn’t like her. He seems to think his five boys can do no wrong, and she just has a mean heart, and picks on them.

When a turn of events lands her running from her abusive past yet again, Grace finds herself married… to Daniel. It all happened purely by accident (I am serious! It was accidental!). Stuck in wilderness with six men who do not want her there Grace has to remember what it’s like to be brave, and that God is always faithful. It doesn’t help her new husband avoids her as if she were a plague, and the boys torment her at every turn. The rowdy and loud family, are constantly giving her headaches, just from the sheer noise of them all. Then Grace begins to see how, in all her running, God’s hand was always on her, and always directing her path. Truly, we plan our path, but God directs our steps. Grace learns just how true that is in her life, and prays she can show the six Reeves men.

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So here is the deal, I’ve got a Q&A with Mary Connealy, author of this great story, at the end there will be a contest for a free copy! Be sure to read through so you know how you can win!


Char: Where did this story come from?
Mary: My husband is from a family of seven sons. His mom, Marybelle, is one of my favorite people on this planet and listening to her talk is both hilarious and terrifying. The woman was lucky to survive raising those boys. And she survived brilliantly. She’s eighty-nine now.
This woman is tough! She’s also smart and she has this wonderful sense of humor and she has a great knack for not sweating the small stuff.
She tells stories of pure mayhem. I don’t know how all little boys act but she was always breaking up fist fights and rushing to the doctor with broken bones and cuts that need stitches. They lived on a farm and…if she could possibly arrange it…they ran wild outside.
I got so much of what’s in Calico Canyon from Marybelle that I dedicated the book to her.


Char: I notice this is part of the lassoed in Texas series, why Texas? What do you like so much about Texas?
Mary: You know, Texas is just to utterly western that I have to stop myself from setting all my books in Texas, so Texas was easy.


Char: Your bio says you have four girls, was it hard to write the personalities and interactions between five little boys, compared to having had four girls around you all the time?
Mary: It was a serious challenge, not so much to write boys as to try and make so many little boys, whose looks were identical (except for the twins being older) be individuals.
You know the scene where Grace tells the boys how she tells them apart? As she runs down their differences, at the end of that, she glares, good naturedly at Mark and says, I know you from the fire in your eyes.” Well, I tried to give Mark that fire through the whole book. He was the most developed of the five but all the boys were real to me and I focused on having every word they said, within this parameter where they all acted so, so much alike, to be faithful to those differences.
I got the idea for Luke the so-tough-he’s-scary youngest from ‘The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’ if you’ve seen that and remember Gladys Herdman, she was the youngest and the meanest of them all.
And I liked the idea that the oldest would SEEMED to be the leader but he was very subtly taking orders from a stronger personality than his own.
Throw in Ike, the animal lover and the ‘good one’ John and I had the whole set.


Char: Who was your favorite of the Reeves boys? Mine would be John, because he reminds me of one of my brothers.
Mary: I think I secretly liked John best, too. But Mark was definitely the most fun to write. And I got to do so much with my characters through Mark, Daniel realizing he needed to be kinder to Grace so his boy wouldn’t grow up warped. Grace realizing she loved a little boy who was such a handful, to me that’s the sign of a true mother, to love their children, possibly the very most, when they’re not so lovable.

Char: Tillie was a really interesting character, a runaway slave, who had remained a slave well after the law granted her, her freedom. I honestly never really heard of that happening, I think, often, people think that the end of the civil war was the end all to the slavery in the south. I never really thought about people who might not have known the war was over, if they were kept in the dark. Where did the idea for Tillie come from?
Mary: Oddly enough, the whole idea of Tillie comes from a line in Gingham Mountain. That’s book three in the series and I didn’t have Tillie in Calico Canyon at first. In Gingham Mountain, Hannah who is trying to care for orphans who live on the streets of Chicago, meets a man she thinks is mistreating orphans. The man has taken in so many children and Hannah doesn’t like it a bit. Two of Grant’s orphans are black and when Hannah says Grant has enslaved children, one of those children gets really angry and says, “You’re a mean lady to come in here and tell Pa he’s treating us bad. You don’t know what bad is if you can say such things.”
Hannah thinks to herself that she knows exactly what bad was. She’d lived it herself when she’d been in her cruel stepfather’s hands. She has lash marks of her own, and she knew you didn’t have to be black to be a slave.
So that got me thinking about slavery and wanting to draw the distinction between slavery and other kinds of abusive treatment, but my book was set to long after the Civil War to have someone newly freed, until I started researching it and I came up with these amazing stories of black people who hadn’t been set free after the Civil War, just hidden.
So along comes the idea of Tillie.

Char: Did you ever have a time when writing this book you just had to stop and start laughing?
Mary: You know, Char, comedy is hard work. It really is. The scene, one of my favorites in Calico Canyon, when they get married, took so long to write.
I like a scene with too much going on, chaos, lots of characters, but it’s so hard to get it all right. To put it on the page. People talking over each other. People listening to half of one person’s sentence and then the other half of someone else and having that end up meaning something that makes them mad. I wrote that scene so many times. No rewriting the whole thing, but packing it with nonsense. Tweaking it, getting the beats right and trying to make sure that, while the characters are bickering and misunderstanding and reacting comically, the reader understands what’s going on. It takes a lot of attention and time. I love it but I always dread a scene like that because I know it’s going to be so much work.

Char: Did you learn any lesson while writing this story? Anything particular that God revealed to you?
Mary: I wrote this book not that long after my father died. I was on an airplane and I happened to think of one song we had at his funeral, Great is Thy Faithfulness. That song just helped me really focus on what I was trying to accomplish with this book. Not our faithfulness to God, which is so often where our attention lies, but God’s Faithfulness to us. Once Grace was reminded of how faithful God was to her, she could live so much more bravely for Him. And once she remembered how to be brave, her life because much simpler.

Char: You mentioned in your dedication, that your mother-in-law had raised seven boys! Is this where the inspiration came for the five Reeves boys?
Mary: Definitely. My mother-in-law can tell so many unruly little boy stories, I could fill ten books.

Char: What’s your favorite “little boy stories” that she tells?
Mary: She had the first five of her boys really fast. Then my husband and one more brother are stragglers. Of the five older boys, the youngest seems to be the one who had the most brushes with death. She heard a scream one time and ran outside and he was hanging from the eaves of her roof by his fingernails.
She heard a crash once and ran upstairs, he’d smashed through a window and was just standing there, with his head through the window, a jagged circle of the window pane surrounding him. Uncut.
Once when he was three a neighbor came pulling into her yard and lifted the boy out and brought him in…naked. The neighbor had found him walking down the road like that.
She asked the kid what he was doing and he said he was going swimming. They live ten miles from the nearest swimming pool so she has no idea what was in his head.
My mother-in-law swears she was watching him but he was just determined to keep up with his big brothers and they didn’t seem to worried about leaving him behind so that left him stuck, alone in some tight spots in his young life.

Char: Is there a favorite ‘little girl story’ you would have?
Mary: My girls are little balls of fire. They could outpace most little boys for pure energy when they were kids. One family gathering, Christmas, at my in-laws (they live about three miles from us and we farm their land) I had three girls at the time, one of Ivan’s brothers had three boys and another had two girls. All about the same age. It was a nasty, bitter cold Christmas Eve and when we got there I and the other family of girls, had brought winter clothes because we knew the kids would want to go outside and play despite the weather. The mother of the boys hadn’t brought stuff to bundle them up. They had coats and mittens but no boots, scarves, snow pants. We laughed because she thought she could control the boys but the other mom and I knew our girls would be outside so we might as well be prepared.

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I could ask questions all day, but I won’t. Here’s how to win a signed copy of Calico Canyon: leave a comment on this blog, telling your favorite “little boy or little girl” story. You get bonus points if it’s funny, and bonus points if it taught you a lesson about God. And even more points it the lesson was about God’s faithfulness! You have until Sunday 11/09/08!