Gardenias: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Faith Sullivan
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $3.00
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 671815
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.4
ISBN: 1571310452
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781571310453
ASIN: 1571310452
Publication Date: August 22, 2005
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Product Description
It's 1942, just a month after the United States entered World War II. Lark, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty are in a station changing trains, leaving their lives in Harvester, Minnesota behind, and waiting for the train going to Los Angeles. Young men — soldiers — swarm the platform, heading off to war. Against this dramatic backdrop, Gardenias revisits Faith Sullivan’s most beloved characters from The Cape Ann, taking them from their hometown to new lives, new dreams, and new risks. Arlene has left her husband behind after he gambled away the money she'd saved to finally build the Cape Ann house of her and Lark's Depression-era dreams. As a new life takes shape in San Diego in a wartime housing project full of neighbors they know little about, Lark wonders, as does the reader, if a dream means losing everything of value or finally finding it.
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| Customer Reviews:
Gardenias: A Novel February 18, 2007
Sherrie St Hilaire (Wapato, WA United States)
I couldn't put this book down, as was the case with it's prequil, The Cape Anne. Gardenias is a great journey through the lives of real characters. Their dreams, loves and heartaches are made tangible by Ms. Sullivan's ability to write, with clarity, in her raw and gripping style. You will fall in love with Lark, the child through whom this world is lived. You will become acquainted with the perplexing nature of humans in their struggles to find happiness.
 A moving continuation to Sullivan's CAPE ANN January 11, 2006
Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Faith Sullivan has written two previous novels set in the fictional small town of Harvester, Minnesota. Her first, THE CAPE ANN, was published in 1988 and focused on six-year-old Lark Erhardt, who narrated the story of her mother's desire for a better life and her father's repeated shattering of those dreams. Readers who fell in love with Lark's combination of innocence and observation, as well as with Sullivan's old-fashioned storytelling abilities, have had to wait a long time to find out more about Lark's story. Now, with GARDENIAS, the wait is finally over.
The novel begins in 1942, as nine-year-old Lark and her newly separated mother and aunt Betty travel by train from southern Minnesota to San Diego. Eager to obtain war work and as much distance as possible from her estranged husband, Lark's mother finds a good office job and a small house. While her mother concentrates on making a comfortable and beautiful home, and her aunt focuses on her rapidly advancing career in fashion, Lark comes to know the motley group of residents, many of them Midwestern transplants, inhabiting their housing project.
Among these neighbors is Shirley, a girl who's Lark's age. Although the bossy, overbearing girl often clashes with Lark, the adults in Lark's life warm quickly to Shirley. Neglected at best and abused at worst, Shirley also shows promising musical talent when she takes piano lessons from Lark's mother and another neighbor. Uncomfortably wise beyond her years, Shirley clues the more innocent Lark into the ways of the world.
During her few years in San Diego, Lark loses much of her innocence, in the wake of the war, her mother's secret love for another man, and her father's increasingly menacing letters. Her narrative voice, which combines a childlike impressionability with keen observation, is still winning, and readers can observe Lark growing into the writer she is obviously meant to become.
Although Sullivan's portrayal of wartime San Diego lacks some of the intimacy of her portrayals of her native southern Minnesota, her affection for the Erhardt family remains and will once again draw readers new and old into the lives of this small, determined and loving family.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
A must read! November 29, 2005
armchairinterviews.com (Minnesota)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
The long-awaited sequel to Cape Ann has finally arrived.
Lark Erhardt, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty arrive in San Diego in 1942, breaking away from their Depression-era lives in Harvester, Minnesota with abusive, gambling Willie Erhardt.
Aunt Betty is still suffering from the death of her baby and the abandonment of her husband, Stanley.
Arlene holds the family together, finding housing in a wartime project and a job as a secretary at Consolidated Aircraft. Betty finds work as a clerk in a big department store.
Lark must cope with a gang of violent and ruthlessly vicious boys who threaten her. She deals with it by mostly staying at home, writing and hiding.
Lark finds a magical painting of a cabin in the woods, and imagines it is in Minnesota and that she is living there. She starts fourth grade and is terribly alone, only her writing to hold on to. She misses Minnesota, but not her father. They attempt to make a home, planting a gardenia bush and some daisies that Lark carefully waters every day.
Betty and Arlene befriend lonely sailors, giving them home-cooked meals on the weekend. Shirley, another misfit girl, finds food, praise, and a safe haven with Lark's family from her own very dysfunctional family life. Shirley is prickly and even sometimes nasty to Lark. Almost a second child in the family, Shirley takes piano lessons from Aunt Betty, and the family helps clothe her and finance her further musical education. For Shirley, music is an escape--just as Lark's writing is a refuge.
Upheavals come in many forms: Willie comes to California to demand their return; Uncle Stanley shows up, telling them he has enlisted. Neighbors in the project become dear friends, as Lark learns their stories and tells them hers. Finally several events shatter all their lives, and change them forever.
Armchair Interviews says: Sullivan is a wonderful and evocative storyteller, making the 1940s and wartime San Diego, the labor movement, the death of Roosevelt, and social upheaval of women in the workforce, the music and the fear, all come alive.
A wonderful, deeply satisfying novel October 30, 2005
Helen Sheehy
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I loved GARDENIAS. I could not put it down. With consummate skill and grace and the easy mastery of a mature writer, Faith Sullivan creates and populates a world that lives and breathes. The novel is funny and moving and suspenseful and deeply wise--both a pageturner and a literary classic. Read this novel, give it to your friends, pass it on to your children.
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