Ellen Foster
by:
Kaye Gibbons (author)
Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction. An eleven-year-old heroine tells her unforgettable story with honesty, perceptivity, humor, and unselfconscious heroism. "The honesty of thought...
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Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction. An eleven-year-old heroine tells her unforgettable story with honesty, perceptivity, humor, and unselfconscious heroism. "The honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word!"--Eudora Welty; "A lovely, breathtaking, sometimes heart-wrenching first novel."--Walker Percy. A LITERARY GUILD SELECTION.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781616203023 (1616203021)
Publish date: October 17th 2012
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Pages no: 144
Edition language: English
Category:
Young Adult,
Novels,
Academic,
School,
Literature,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
American,
Literary Fiction,
Coming Of Age,
Contemporary,
Southern
"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." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kay Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academ...
Gibbons' style reminds me of Cormac McCarthy. For me, that's no compliment. There are no quotation marks around the dialogue, making it harder to keep track of, and almost no commas as far as the eye can see. Gibbons at least could claim a rationale for what in McCarthy I can only see as an affectat...
Ellen Foster is written from the POV of an 11 year old girl who daydreams about killing her alcoholic, abusive father. Left mostly on her own after her mother kills herself, she describes her life with no self pity and copes with managing the household bills and getting food for herself as if it wer...
Another short one, it seems like a year for that. 'Ellen Foster' is written in one of the most convincing young voices I've come across, and thank God early on you know there's a happy ending, because Ellen's life is rough. The novel goes back and forth between Ellen's present and the past two years...
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