Ellen Foster
by Kaye Gibbons.
Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1997: Kaye Gibbons is a writer who brings a short story sensibility to her novels. Rather than take advantage of the novel's longer form to paint her visions in broad, sweeping strokes, Gibbons prefers to concentrate on just one corner of the canvas and only a few colors to produce her small masterpieces. In Gibbons's case, her canvas is the American South and her colors are all the shades of gray.
In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong.
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A Virtuous Woman
by Kaye Gibbons.
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
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Charms for the Easy Life
by Kaye Gibbons.
A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeatlives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina.In a sad and singular era, they are unique among womenof their time. For radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy andbrilliant daughter Margaret possess powerful charmsto ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that alltoo often beats a path to their door.
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