Drenched in Light (Tending Roses Series #4) - Softcover

Wingate, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451218485 ISBN 13: 9780451218483

Publisher: NAL Trade, 2006

Synopsis

Once a gifted ballet dancer, Julia Costell buckled under the demands of a professional dance career, and has landed with a thud in an unglamorous job as a guidance counselor at a performing arts high school. Living back home with her parents and feeling lost, she is afraid she’ll never soar again…until the day young Dell Jordan is sent to her office, carrying an essay.

In Dell’s writing, Julia sees luminous sparks of hope. But as she fights to forge a brighter future for one disadvantaged student, she is drawn into startling undercurrents of conflict and denial within the academy. Only when she is tested in ways she never could have imagined does she begin to discover where real meaning and fulfillment lie—and realize that even though her life has seemed off course, she’s been on the right path all along.

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Wingate writes both Accent novels and contemporary romances for NAL.  She lives with her husband and two sons in the central Texas hill country, where she is a popular inspirational speaker, writing instructor, and magazine columnist.

Reviews

A former ballet dancer and recovering bulimic helps herself by helping others in this clunky morality tale from Wingate (Over the Moon at the Big Lizard Diner). Ex-ballerina Julia takes a job as a guidance counselor at a middle school for gifted children, where she quickly becomes suspicious that Harrington students are using drugs (the shocking truth: they are). Julia quickly finds a raison d'être in Dell, a piano prodigy and the orphan child of a heroin-addicted mother whose foster parents are keen but whose GPA is in the gutter. Dell gets Julia involved in an after-school program for under-privileged kids, while Julia helps Dell improve her grades. Meanwhile, Julia's unattached sister gets unexpectedly pregnant-and Julia learns that her family thinks about more than her eating disorder. Julia's real lesson comes, though, when she's fired for refusing to recant or apologize for accusing a Harrington student of using drugs. There are many life lessons in this trite, feel good novel, though adult readers will have learned them a long time ago.
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While attending a prestigious performing arts school, Julia envisioned herself as a prima ballerina with the Kansas City ballet, but her dream caved in under the reality of her anorexia. Now she is living under the watchful eye of her parents and taking life one bite at a time as a junior-high guidance counselor. Her feelings of failure threaten to overwhelm her until she meets a special student, Dell, a musical virtuoso with little formal education living with foster parents who have no idea of the difficulty Dell has fitting in with the school's wealthy and intolerant students. Together, Julia and Dell confront the establishment. Wingate continues Dell's story from The Language of Sycamores (2005), producing another winner. Patty Engelmann
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: NAL Trade
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451218485
• ISBN 13: 9780451218483
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320