This youthful tale is not so much about fishing as it is about the discovery of values. It teaches without preaching. Here is a marvelously acute sense of what it is like to be on the cusp of adolesence: still innocent but now aware that deeper truths, like larger fish, swim beneath the surface and wait to be caught and revealed.

In their own ways, the stories in TexasSoundtrack are as musical as the songs thatinspired them, each with its own rhythm, itsown beat, its own insights into Texas peopleand Texas places. They resonate in the mindlong after you read them.

Far from being chivalric romances, these stories vividly illustrate real people in love, real people like all of us. The characters in this assemblage get by as best they can in often humorous and always poignant ways. Among the characters are -an idealistic eleven-year-old with a gift for pencil drawing and a crush on his teacher -a forty-seven-year-old real estate agent looking for another ego-bolstering bedpost notch -a beautiful, lonely young woman whose only knowledge of love comes from classical literature and her mother's dire warnings about nasty things boys seek.

Editors Laurence Musgrove and Terry Dalrymple have collected poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from 59 writers on the power and beauty of weather in the Lone Star State. The resulting anthology from Lamar University Literary Press, Texas Weather, celebrates with intimate detail and incredible scope why Texans are so fascinated with, wary of, confounded by, and thankful for their weather.