Ellen Foster
CRITIQUE | QUOTES
First editionFirst publication
1987
Literature form
Novel
Genres
Literary
Writing language
English
Author's country
United States
Length
Approx. 40,000 words
It takes more than pluck
From those wonderful, shocking opening lines to the end, Ellen Foster is a completely absorbing novel, and the incredible thing is that Kaye Gibbons seems not to work at it. It all just flows straight from Ellen's strange young mind onto the paper and into ours.
We know better of course. Such a writer puts in painstaking work to appear effortless. Yet Gibbons is also obviously a natural storyteller.
Which in her case is the same as saying she's a natural creator of characters. For Ellen Foster's story comes from Ellen Foster; nothing is imposed on the character—nothing is given her to do, nothing is added to the plot because it would be cute or would make for a dramatic twist or would make her more endearing to the reader
Rather it's the fully realized character of Ellen that insists on the dramatic plot turns and in a bizarre way endears her to us.
Think of Pippi Longstocking or Anne of Green Gables or any of those other abandoned bu plucky lasses of literature, who have become models of empowerment for young girls. Then forget them. They're fantasy. Ellen's the real deal. Open hearted. Scarily hardnosed. Afraid and wracked with guilt. Mean and tricky. Idealist and pragmatic at the same time. It's the contradictions, the shades, that give her such reality in the reader's mind.
It takes a great talent to make such complexity seem so simply right that we just accept it: it's just Ellen.
And the whole novel's like that. Soaring and pathetic. Inspiring and heart-breaking. And just right.
Claustrophobic, young point of view
When speaking of Gibbons's work it's sometimes hard to avoid sounding mushy. But there's a difference between sentiment and sentimentality. Sentiment is messy, both good and bad mixed up together, what we all go though in real life. Sentimentality is a greeting card. Gibbons doesn't do greeting cards. Ellen Foster is as tough as The Catcher in the Rye (a book it has been compared to, perhaps for the claustrophobic, single, young person's point of view). Tougher maybe.
Ellen Foster is barely long enough to be considered a novel but it doesn't feel like anything less, presenting a depth and breadth that other novelists spend two or three times as many words to achieve.
Nor is it a young girl's novel. Though every girl and boy should read it. And then reread it as a grown-up woman or man to get it all over again.
— Eric
CRITIQUE | QUOTES
