A Family of Good Women

What is the true meaning of family?

Imogene Good finds herself wrestling with this question when, still grieving her mother’s death, she abandons a promising teaching career to open a boarding house in the near-lawless oil boomtown of Borger, Texas. Alone.

The business thrives, love arrives in the form of mysterious Texas Ranger, and Imogene takes in a stray dog and a runaway cousin from the Good family farm in East Texas. But months later, as fatigue, mounting threats, and violence against her business threatens to overwhelm her, she finds refuge in the contents of a trunk she carted to town after her mother’s death.

In it, Imogene finds secrets about the women who raised her that changes her life and her understanding of family. Can the Good women build a new life from the ashes of hardship on the inhospitable plains of the 1920s Texas Panhandle?

Inspired by historical events, A Family of Good Women is a compelling tale of inner strength, the bonds of family, and the power of the human spirit.

Since completing a graduate degree in creative writing in 2012, Teddy Jones has made creating fiction her full-time occupation. She’s had six novels and a collection of short stories published and collected some prizes along the way. Jackson’s Pond, Texas was finalist in the Women Writing the West Willa Award for contemporary fiction in 2014, and one of her short stories won the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition first prize medal in 2015. Marva Cope, another novel, was named finalist for the Sarton Award in 2024.

Jones earned a degree in nursing and a doctorate in education, worked as a family nurse practitioner and was founding dean of the School of Nursing at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.
She focused on rural health promotion and was a monthly columnist for The Farmer Stockman for thirteen years. When she and her husband decided in 2001 to leave their ＂real jobs＂ and begin farming, opportunity presented itself. ＂If you’re going to write fiction, now’s the time,＂ she told herself. She’s been at it ever since.