Stories from the Sheriff's Daughter

Stories From the Sheriff's Daughter is a short novel that follows the life of a nine-year-old girl who moves to a small-town Texas county jail when her dairy farmer father is elected sheriff. The episodes, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, evoke small town Texas in the 1950s and 60s. The family's house is only separated from the jail by a carport, so the sheriff's daughter grows up in the jail's environment of lawmen, prisoners, and politics. She bumps up against some of life's worst tragedies, including murder, rape, and suicide, despite her parents' attempts to protect her innocence. In this very different coming-of-age story, the sheriff's daughter moves into adulthood, trying to find her own identity, her life forever affected by growing up in next door to a county jail. Though the stories in the novel are fiction, the author actually did grow up at the Burleson County jail in Texas, where her father, and eventually her mother, served as sheriffs of the county.