The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The triumphant return of the New York Times bestselling novel’s orphaned heroine—“the Southern Holden Caulfield . . . the female Huck Finn” (Bookmarks Magazine).
Ellen Foster, fifteen years old, formidable, and back in North Carolina with a loving new foster mother, has written to the president of Harvard, asking for early admission. Having already crammed a lot of tragedy, adversity, and trauma into her young years, surely she’s due something.
In the meantime, she’s got a lot on her plate: composing poetry and selling it to classmates; trying to tactfully back away from a marriage proposal from her best friend; administering compassion to a slow-witted neighbor who’s found herself pregnant; and planning ahead for a writing camp for the gifted. Fueled by an indomitable spirit, undeterred by a naiveté she refuses to acknowledge, and patiently waiting on word from Mr. Derek Bok about her admission to the Ivy League, Ellen is going to continue to cram, while plotting her own deliverance from a town she knows in her heart she’s outgrown.
Alice Hoffman, in The New York Times Book Review, said Ellen Foster “may be the most trustworthy character in recent fiction.” After her debut in Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster— awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club—Ellen returns in this unforgettable sequel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this folksy sequel to the 1997 Oprah pick Ellen Foster, Gibbons's plucky heroine is 15 and hoping for early admission to Harvard on account of "all the surplus living that was jammed into the years." Having survived trauma and tragedy, Ellen has found safety with a loving foster mother. She sells her poetry to underachieving classmates, thereby paying her way to a camp for the gifted at Johns Hopkins, where she realizes she doesn't know "how to feel at home out in the world or at home either." She returns to North Carolina, goes to the fair, negotiates a marriage proposal from her best friend and learns that her aunt has cheated her out of her inheritance. The plot is minimal; the pleasure for fans will be in Ellen's idiosyncratic worldview and signature syntax ("The rhythm of the world out here picks up when the farmer across the road begins plowing.... Crossing the wide ditch and walking... as the ground's being turned over to expose arrowheads, which you may find one or several of, I was getting dirty in the good clothes I shouldn't have been over there in"). Even as good guys falter, readers can trust that all will be right in the end in this extended curtain call for a fondly remembered character.
