Ellen Foster (Gibbons)

Ellen Foster
Kaye Gibbons, 1987
Random House
126 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375703058


Summary
Winner of the Kaufman Prize—American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

When I was young, I would think of ways to kill my daddy." So begins Kaye Gibbon's debut novel, Ellen Foster, a powerful story told by the epononymous Ellen, an 11-year orphan whose violent father is responsible for her mother's suicide. Ellen is eventually taken out of her father's care and placed in a series of temporary homes—first with her grandmother, where she is made to toil in the fields as twisted payback for her father's brutality, and then with a neglectful aunt and her spoiled daughter, Dora.

Told as a dual narrative, Ellen Foster follows the heroine's ordeals both chronologically and in reflection, and ends with her wish of a "new mama" fulfilled. (From the publisher.)