Ella in Bloom
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Shelby Hearon has been widely praised for the insight, wit, and subtlety with which her novels limn the complexities of marriage and family ("What Jane Austen is to courtship, Shelby Hearon is to marriage" --New York Newsday), and the ways in which place can profoundly affect us all. Now, with Ella in Bloom, Hearon gives us her sharpest, funniest, most telling novel yet.
It is the story of Ella, who has always lived in the shadow of her "perfect" older sister. A gutsy single parent eking out a living for herself and her intrepid teenage daughter Birdie, Ella invents a genteel life, writing to her mother in drought-baked Texas about her heirloom roses, her linen dresses, and other amenities of a respectable life in Old Metairie, Louisiana. Little does her mother know about the run-down, scruffy house Ella really lives in, or that she makes ends meet by watering rich people's houseplants when they flee the coastal summer heat.
But when Ella's beautiful sister Terrell, on the way to meet her lover, is suddenly killed in a chartered plane crash, old family patterns are shattered. And Ella, confronting the reality of her life (and of the man she had relegated to the past) comes, finally and fully, into bloom.
Wise, wicked, and moving, in Shelby Hearon's hands this portrait of a woman--a woman we all know--is guaranteed to give extraordinary pleasure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Veteran Hearon's (Life Estates; Footprints; Owning Jolene; etc.) 16th novel is a compassionate, gently ironic tale of the choices two Texas women make in rebellion and deference to their mother. The chatty narrative style belies the author's deeply wise perspective, succeeding in lifting a familiar themeD"middle-aged woman gets a second chance at love"Dloftily above its usual treatment. Older sister Terrell was always the favorite of her domineering mother, Agatha, keeping up appearances in deference to Agatha's obsessions with elegance and etiquette, marrying lawyer Rufus "Red" Hall, building an impressive house by a lake and never relaxing propriety. Ella, the narrator and younger sister, is living in squalor in Old Metairie, La., with her precocious teenage daughter, Birdie, hiding from her mother the fact that she waters houseplants for a living. Having run off with a scoundrel as a teenager, Ella is only partially restored to Agatha's good graces by early widowhood and Terrell's accidental death. Ella dreads the family reunion in Austin, Tex., for Agatha's birthday, but when Ella and widower Red rekindle their youthful affection, even Birdie and her cousins, Red's two sons, Borden and Bailey, approve of their middle-aged parents' emotional healing. Of course, secrets must be uncovered first. Though this is clearly a woman's story, the three generations of men prove sympathetic characters. If the secrets rarely seem surprising and the guilt they create appear disproportionate to contemporary mores, that only adds to the humanity of the story. As Ella redefines herself and what it is to be a family, Hearon celebrates thoughtfulness and the wisdome of getting on with life.
