Ellen Foster
   Kaye Gibbons
  1998 Vintage Books NY USA
   ISBN: 0785727442


A candid and humorous rural girl grows up fast when her mother dies and her dad drinks away their money.

Kaye Gibbons, in her first novel, has unerringly created this independent, candid and humorous voice of a rural Carolinian girl recounting how she got herself a new mother. How Ellen was made to grow up fast as her dad drinks away their monthly money and ridicules her mother who kills herself with pills, absorbs you, fascinates you.

Ellen introduces us to her best friend, Starletta, a younger colored girl whom she is finally having over for the weekend in her new mom's home. Ellen introduces us to her prejudices too and we witness her feelings for Starletta and her family surmount those fears. Ellen chats with us in a knowing irony about how she sees the world, about the adults in her life, the way they control each other and her plans for her new life.

Ellen manages to live on the edge for a while, keeping clear of her dad and his drinking friends, she tries to turn a visit with an aunt into a permanent thing and the aunt will have nothing of it. Then her wealthy mother's mother claims her and Ellen must live in her vindictive grandmother's home, the same one from which her own mother fled.

In this lonely place of rules and cleanliness, Ellen still is allowed no childhood and eventually must nurse her ailing grandmother until she too dies. Ellen shows us how she made the best of laying-outs for her mother's mother, so much better than the one she made for her mother when she was a lot younger.

I was touched by Ellen's anticipation of her best friend's visit for a weekend and how Ellen chooses her last name is so profound that it vibrated long after I closed the book. This is a very good read that wilts your heart from lack of loving care and then, when there's just a withered old raisin left in your chest, Ellen's plans ripen and she steps toward the light of hope. I am so glad there are women alive and thriving like Ellen and her new mom.

An Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca