Larry Lentchner’s novel, I Should Have Known Better, is insightful, highly entertaining and heartfelt. Its principal character, Phil Green, is a good guy a lot of women might have fallen in love with back in the day – and still could. He is also deeply introspective, self-deprecating and a worrier, to the point of being at least a little neurotic. Somehow, all that makes him even more appealing.
In Josie’s Closet by Kim Peters Josie Lambert, a woman in her late thirties, is a talented and successful costume designer at a Hollywood studio. Though her job is high stress and her boss is a volatile and egotistical man, she is extremely good at her work, especially when it requires designs for films set in historical eras.
Underneath, however, she is a bundle of raw emotions, including anxiety and fear, the result of years of emotional and physical abuse from Sam, her domineering, cheating husband. When we first meet Josie, she is in the process of an acrimonious separation agreement which will eventually lead to her divorce.
Terry L. Broxson’s The Governor’s Trophy, set in 1956, looks at racial segregation as it continued to exist in some mid-twentieth century Texas schools even after it was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka landmark decision of 1954.
Broxson, himself a 60s-era high school debater, created a scenario for his novel in which his future real-life high school debate coach, Maridell Fisher (later Fryar), and her debate partner, Wretha Whittle (later Wiley), competed against Barbara Jordan and Otis King in a Texas collegiate debate tournament. Fisher and Whittle were white college students at Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist institution in Abilene. Jordan and King attended Houston’s Texas Southern University, an all-Black school, now recognized as a public historically Black university. It would be the first time that Black students would be participants in what was previously an all-white event.
