A Cure for Dreams - Hardcover

Gibbons, Kaye

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0945575335 ISBN 13: 9780945575337

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1991

Synopsis

A story that traces the bonds between four generations of resourceful Southern women through stories passed from one generation to another.

About this title

About the Author

Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina and attended Rocky Mount Senior High School, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first novel, Ellen Foster, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction of the American Academy and Institute of the Arts and Letters and a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and was recently awarded the PEN/Revson Fellowship for A Cure for Dreams. She is writer-in-residence at the Library of North Carolina State University. She and her husband, Michael, and their three daughters Mary, Leslie and Louise, live in Raleigh.

From Publishers Weekly

Further enchancing her reputation as a chronicler of small-town life in the South, Gibbons ( Ellen Foster ) limns an engaging portrait of a possessive mother and her obedient daughter as the foreground of a larger canvas depicting women's roles in a society bound by tradition, convention and poverty. Deliberately old-fashioned in prose style, down to the chapter headings reminiscent of 19th-century novels, this slim volume is narrated by Betty Randolph, who tells of her domineering mother's life: how she rejected her husband after Betty was born and was relieved to be left a young widow and the "queen bee" of the community; how mother and daughter became inseparable, until Betty was in her 20s and suddenly realized she was on her way to spinsterhood. The plot is a series of loosely connected vignettes, enlivened by Betty's tart comments and the pithy aphorisms of plain country folk (of an officious woman, Betty says, "I'm sure when she died and entered heaven she asked to see the upstairs"). Gibbons conveys the atmosphere of the Depression and World War II with frequent comments about Presidents Hoover and FDR, and such period detail as the birth of the Dionne quintuplets. Though entertaining, the novel is short on suspense, however; one of the few instances of narrative tension turns on the question of why Betty's suitor has blue lips.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0945575335
• ISBN 13: 9780945575337
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 182