Ellen Foster (Kaye Gibbons, 1987)

With the exception of The Joy Luck Club (1989), Ellen Foster is the latest chronologically published book to date in the Novels for Students series. For reference, there are 49 volumes in the series and this is the third, published nearly 20 years ago. With a little quick math, one learns this book was only ten years old when included in the series. We've already tread here with Democracy, but it's clear the compilers of the series were not identifying "classics" in the strictest sense of the term, but also trying to identify "current literature" that may have been entering the classroom at that time. Some, like The Giver (1993) enter proudly into the classics column at a young age. Others sort of just run their course.

While I'm not sure Ellen Foster has held up as well as some of its contemporaries, it enjoyed the fruits of the "Oprah effect" when it was picked for the book club in 1997 along with Gibbons's second book, A Virtuous Woman. Over time it's been buried heavily by subsequent more prominent and/or controversial selections. It would be easy for me to dismiss this as Oprah fodder (female main character, serious family problems, frank discussion of race), but I'll try to take the high road here. Like most of Gibbons's books, it's very short. Having not read any of the other books, I can't say any comparative about the structure, but this book is a kind of micro-Odyssey as Ellen, the eponymous 11 year old protagonist of the book, flees from her abusive father and seeks a surrogate parent. Either due to outside circumstances (friend's family, teacher), or internal conflict (aunt, grandma), nobody really fits the role to Ellen's expectations. There's a little bit of deus ex machina in the conclusion, but the structure of the book, going back and forth in time, ensures it is no surprise what will eventually work for Ellen.

As I was fully aware going into reading some of these books in the series, I'm likely not the target audience of this book. However, I tried approaching it with an open mind and found there was plenty interesting about the book. While I'm not going to rush out and complete my Kaye Gibbons bibliography, I'm glad I read this book.