Books- Kaye Gibbons

She is one of my all time favorites! I first read Ellen Foster in high school, read a few more in college and then a few years ago started reading everything she has ever written. I kind of get them all confused because I read a lot of them all at once, getting them from the East Point Library about two years ago. I think this is the full list of what she has written and pulled some reviews to help identify them. They are all so good, except for her latest one. Gibbons is from North Carolina and was born in 1960. Wikipedia describes her as suffering from bipolar disorder. One of the characters in Sights Unseen suffers from this disorder. The book certainly takes you there and you feel a bit like you are going a little insane yourself. They are set in the South and about characters you feel you already know. She makes me want to write about my life experiences in the South and the characters I grew up with. She reminds me of Harper Lee.

Ellen Foster (1987) This one is the most popular, it's on the Oprah book club list and was made into a television movie. Review: "The voice of this resourceful child is mesmerizing because we are right inside her head. The words are always flawlessly right....Thus does Gibbons persuade us, as few writers can, that even a terrible childhood can be a state of grace." The New Republic

A Cure for Dreams (1992) Synopsis: A story that traces the bonds between four generations of resourceful Southern women through stories passed from one generation to another.

Charms for the Easy Life (1993)

I think this one was made into a movie as well. Publisher Comments: In the verdant backwoods of North Carolina, in a sad and singular era, the Birches are unique among women of their time-living gloriously rich it decidedly offbeat lives in a private world abandoned by men. And though misery often heats a path to their door, headstrong Sophia and her brilliant daughter Margaret possess charms to ward off loneliness and despair-thanks to the uncompromising strength, uncommon wisdom, and muscular love of a remarkable matriarch and self-taught healer who calls herself Charlie Kate.

A Virtuous Woman (1997) This one also made the Oprah book club; The Publisher comments state, "When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life. On The Occasion Of My Last Afternoon: A Novel (1998)- set in 1842 in the South, is about racial tolerance and strong women

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (1998) From School Library Journal YA-In 1900, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell tells her life story, beginning when she was 12 in antebellum Virginia. Her father, who used brutality and fear to intimidate family, slaves, and servants, killed a slave in a fit of anger. The plantation household was managed by Clarice, a free black woman of courage and loyalty. Emma Garnet's younger sister Maureen was both dutiful and eager to learn the graces that attracted a suitable husband. Independent of spirit, disdainful of housewifely skills, intelligent and opinionated, Emma Garnet determined to escape from Seven Oaks. Details of her reminiscences are sketchy at times, but she met and married Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, a surgeon and everything her father was not. Her mother unselfishly urged her daughter to take Clarice with her to help them get settled in Raleigh, where Quincy planned to set up his medical practice. Clarice never returned, but devoted herself to the Lowells and their three daughters. Emma Garnet tells her story with unflinching honesty, revealing a complex character who changed from a self-absorbed and indulged child to a loving wife and mother. She eventually opened her home to wounded Confederate soldiers and found new purpose and meaning in her life by helping others. YAs will find Emma Garnet, Maureen, Clarice, and Quincy to be fascinating and endearing characters whose flaws as well as strengths are revealed as the story unfolds. The author's picture of life in the Civil War South is vivid and unsentimental, and her characters are drawn with clarity and sympathy.Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA

Divining Women (2004) - Publisher Comments:
In her darkest yet most redeeming novel, Gibbons scorches us with a firestorm of despair — and then resurrects love and hope from its very ashes.
Autumn 1918: Rumors of peace are spreading across America, but spreading even faster are the first cases of Spanish influenza, whispering of the epidemic to come. Maureen Ross, well past a safe childbearing age, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. Her husband, Troop — cold and careless of her condition — is an emotional cripple who has battered her spirit throughout their marriage. As Maureen's time grows near, she becomes convinced she will die in childbirth. Into this loveless ménage arrives Mary Oliver, Troop's niece. The sheltered child of a well-to-do, freethinking Washington family, Mary comes to help Maureen in the last weeks of her confinement. Horrified by Troop's bullying, she soon discovers that her true duty is to protect her aunt.
As the influenza spreads and the death toll grows, Troop's spiteful behaviors worsen. Tormenting his wife, taunting her for her "low birth," hiding her mother's letters, Troop terrorizes the household. But when Mary fights back, he begins to go over the edge, and Maureen rallies, releasing a stunning thunderstorm of confrontation and, ultimately, finding spiritual renewal.

Sights Unseen (2005) - "is the author at her most passionate and heartfelt best — an unforgettable tale of unconditional love, and of a family's desperate search for normalcy in the midst of madness. It is a novel of rare poignancy, wit and evocative power — the story of tragic, emotionally devastated Maggie, 'the Barnes woman with all the problems, and daughter Hattie, a child struggling to rind a place for herself in her damaged mother's heart'". This one is my personal favorite.

The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster (2005)- Carla, who is an expert on all things, didn't like this one at all. I bought her the autographed hard back edition for her birthday that year. We were both disappointed. I don't think I ever finished it. I trust my sister in all things.