“The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster”
by Kaye Gibbons
Published: October 2006
ISBN: 0156032902

(Updated: May 29, 2007.)

From the Publisher…

In this sequel to Gibbons’s beloved classic Ellen Foster, Ellen, now fifteen, is settled into a permanent home with a new mother. Strengthened by adversity and blessed with enough intelligence to design a salvation for herself, she still feels ill at ease. But while she holds fast to the shreds of her child-hood — humoring her best friend, Stuart, who is determined to marry her; and protecting her old neighbor, slow-witted Starletta — she begins to negotiate her way into a larger world. With a singular mix of perspicacity, naivete, and compas-sion, Ellen draws us into her life and makes us fall in love with her all over again.

Perhaps it’s unfair to read a sequel without having read the original, but that was my case with this book. And, although it’s hard to know how much I missed by reading this story this way, I didn’t feel as though I was reading a sequel and was comfortable with my choice.

That written, I have the same sense with this book as I have with other books by Kaye Gibbons. The story and the characters are almost irrelevant. It is the bits of wisdom, the things that are expressed through the story and the characters that is the charm of this work. The characters are almost forgettable. Their essence isn’t.

All in all, I give this a three out of five hearts on my scale. If you delight in sentences that make you think “Wow! How did she think to write that?”, you won’t be disappointed on picking up this novel.