The Life All Around Me

Those who fell in love with the spunky Ellen Foster will be happy to watch her turn another page in her life. Now 15, she is applying to Harvard and getting her troubled life in order with the help of her foster mother. With her thick South Carolina accent, Kaye Gibbons sounds much like Ellen might, with her quirky syntax and wild imagination, but the author is clearly not a trained reader. She speaks in a monotone that, albeit Southern, fails to differentiate one character from another. Narrative and characters flow together at the same level pace and tone, making it difficult for the reader to stay attentive. P.E.F. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

October 3, 2005
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.