Tomato Girl: A Novel - Hardcover

Pupek, Jayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565124723 ISBN 13: 9781565124721

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008

Synopsis

For eleven-year-old Ellie Sanders, her father has always been the rock that she could cling to when her mother's emotional troubles became too frightening. But when he comes under the thrall of the pretty teenager who raises vegetables and tomatoes for sale at the general store that he runs, Ellie sees her security slowly slipping away. Now she must be witness and warden to her mother's gradual slide into madness.

Told from Ellie's point of view, Tomato Girl takes the reader into the soul of a terrified young girl clinging desperately to childhood while being forced into adulthood years before she is ready. To save herself, she creates a secret world, a place in which her mother gets well, her father returns to being the man he was, and the Tomato Girl is banished forever. Tomato Girl marks the debut of a gifted and promising new author who has written a timeless Southern novel.

About this title

About the Author

Jayne Pupek, who lives near Richmond, is a Virginia native and a former social worker. Though Tomato Girl is her first novel, her writing has appeared in many literary journals. She is the author of a book of poetry titled Forms of Intercession.

From Publishers Weekly

The absorbing, unsettling debut from Pupek centers on 11-year-old Ellie Sanders, who has already seen a lot of heartache in her short, rural mid-20th-century Virginia childhood. Her beautiful but troubled mother, Julia, who today would probably be diagnosed as bipolar, has frequent outbursts necessitating restraints and horse tranquilizers, administered by Ellie's father, Rupert. When a pregnant Julia suffers a bad fall, Rupert uses the incident to bring home more trouble, in the form of Tess, the teenage tomato girl who supplies his general store with home-grown produce. Intended as a caretaker for Julia and Ellie (and a bedmate for himself), Tess, who has troubles of her own, instead initiates a series of increasingly horrific events that leaves the family irreversibly altered. Issues of racial and religious intolerance are touched on lightly, but the real focus of this accomplished debut is the fatalistic accounting of the events engulfing Ellie. Although Ellie's voice is not always consistent with her youth, she's an effective narrator whose storytelling naïveté nicely underscores her innocence. (Aug.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1565124723
• ISBN 13: 9781565124721
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 298