Oklahoma writes novel about oil, love, chicanery

Jun 15, 2008 – Kansas City Star

The price of oil, a burden these days, plays a starring role in a tale of love and chicanery when crude spurted over the top of derricks and city fathers, weary of complaints about the large number of derricks jammed between homes, limited drilling to one oil well per city block.

Libros Libertad, Canada's new independent publisher based in Surrey, British Columbia, announced publication of the novel written by Ed O'Brien, a native Oklahoman. Time of Plenty is set amidst the plethora of crude that flowed in the 1920s and 1930s in and near Oklahoma boom towns of Seminole and Oklahoma City.

Against this backdrop, H. B. Ross, by his late teens a veteran oil hand who browses the encyclopedia in his spare time, struggles with an army of producers who lift so much crude that it pours on the ground wasted as the curtain rises on the Great American Oil Glut. Among the unlimited production crowd is Cecil Jones, who schemes to outwit H. B. and, when not so engaged, attempts to maintain mastery of his wife Mary Belle, a woman of decidedly upsetting ideas, like a bunch of women going off alone, without a single man to guide their thinking for an entire afternoon, to watch a dance marathon at Tulsa. A dutiful wife, Mary Belle manages to give Cecil his way, in every little thing, while steering him, with an unseen touch, to the destination she prefers.

H. B., after a decade in oil, is convinced that the major problem with crude is that there is just too much of the stuff. Everywhere he turns, almost behind every blackjack, he's beginning to believe, rich pools lurk, prompting H. B. to wonder how crude can ever amount to much, with clods yanking it from the ground faster than it can be used.

Libros Libertad can boast of two best sellers in the first year of business: Iliarjuk: An Inuit Memoir by Dracc Dreque and Poodie James by Doug Ramsey.

Additional details about Time of Plenty and the author are available at the publisher's web site: www.libroslibertad.ca.

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