Ordinary Springs - Softcover

Hart, Lenore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425200051 ISBN 13: 9780425200056

Publisher: Berkley Trade, 2005

Synopsis

Still struggling to overcome her feelings of betrayal over the abandonment of her mother, Dory Gamble finds her life turned upside down once again by the arrival of strangers next door, an ailing man dependent on his beautiful and sophisticated wife, and her father's growing feelings for his new female neighbor. By the author of Waterwoman. Original.

About this title

About the Author

Lenore Hart was chosen as one of the five most promising writers in the country for 2002 by Poets and Writers magazine.

Reviews

Dory Gamble's mother disappeared when Dory was just two, leaving Dory and her father in tiny Ordinary Springs, Fla., where lovelorn town ladies circled like buzzards, but the abandoned twosome counted only on each other. Hart (Waterwoman) spins a homespun tale in fine Southern soap opera tradition, as Dory grows up and goes a little wild in the 1950s. The trouble starts when sultry Myra Fitzgerald and her invalid war hero husband, Frank, move in next door. One night, as Myra and Dory's father explore their feelings for each other in the next room, Dory finds herself an accidental accomplice in Frank's suicide. Haunted by guilt and alienated from her father, Dory submits to the advances of a childhood friend the night she turns 16. Her plan is to skip town with money she stole from her dad's hardware store, but she winds up back at home, with the authorities fingering her for Frank's death. It's reform school time—until Dory escapes and winds up at a roadside diner and reptile farm where she works as a waitress, lives in a tepee and gives birth to a daughter. More surprises are still to come—including one about her mother. Gritty, fierce and a little over the top plotwise, Hart's novel is a fine vintage portrait of a tough girl whom life teaches to be tougher. (Jan. 4)
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Hart's gripping follow-up to her debut, Waterwoman (2002), is set in the small town of Ordinary Springs, Florida, in the 1950s. Dory Gamble's mother left when Dory was two, and her father--handsome, emotionally withdrawn Owen, who runs the local hardware store--raised her alone. No one comes between them until beautiful Myra Fitzgerald and her dying husband, Frank, move in next door when Dory is 15. Owen and Myra begin a passionate affair, enraging Dory and leading to her own sexual experimentation with her best friend, Pearce. When Dory wakes one night to find her father gone and the Fitzgeralds' door unlocked, she ventures into their house and sets off a chain of events that will change her life dramatically and take her away from her home in Ordinary Springs, though not in the way she has always imagined. As she did with Waterwoman, Hart tells such an alluring tale that the reader won't want to put the novel down. With accessible, inviting prose, Hart creates in Dory a character both fallible and completely sympathetic. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Berkley Trade
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0425200051
• ISBN 13: 9780425200056
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 367