Stories From the Sheriff’s Daughter is a beautifully written 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. In these engaging episodes, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, days in small-town Texas in the 1950s and 60s spring to life. 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 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.
LAREIDA BUCKLEY graduated from Texas A&M University with honors in 1968, with only thirty-four women in her graduating class. She attended the University of Hawaii’s Graduate School of Library Science and has lived on Hawaii’s Big Island for almost fifty years.
