“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my
daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head
until it got easy.
The way I liked
best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. It would bite him and he'd
be dead and swollen up and I would shudder to find him so. Of course I would
call the rescue squad and tell them to come quick something's the matter with
my daddy. When they come in the house I'm all in a state of shock and just
don't know how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto a
roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over.
But I did not kill
my daddy. He drank his own self to death the year after the County moved me
out. I heard how they found him shut up in the house dead and everything. Next
thing I know he's in the ground and the house is rented out to a family of
four.”
Speaking from a writer’s perspective, Ms. Gibbons makes it
seem like she sat down and wrote this novel in an afternoon. It reads effortlessly which I suspect
means that it was not written in an afternoon. Ms. Gibbons went to great lengths to perfect every line.
If Ellen Foster is
a book you’ve somehow missed, I highly recommend it. The simplicity belies its complexity. This could have been a sad and dark
coming-of-age novel, but Ms. Gibbons keeps the story lively and enticing
through Ellen Foster’s witty and true story telling.
Kaye Gibbons captures southern mentalities and wounds
without being cliché, and the greatest thing about this big little novel is
that Ellen Foster rescues herself.
I give it 5 out of 5 STARS.
Michele Young-Stone
One of my favorite books...
ReplyDeleteI need to put that book on my TBR pile, stat!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments. Jess, you'll love this book.
ReplyDeleteWrote a critical paper on and was amazed by all the mastery I found.
ReplyDelete