I've read lots of reviews of this book that were really positive. All the quotes on the book itself are of course glowing with praise. It was an Oprah's Book Club selection. It got published. A friend chose it for book club. Many people apparently think this is a really amazing book. I'm not exactly sure what I'm missing here. I didn't hate it, but I was just kind of bored and not impressed. The good thing is that it was a very short and easy book to read so I didn't feel like I wasted a lot of time. If you want to read a book about poverty, abuse, and a dysfunctional family in the South with a girl that manages to get through it all successfully, I would highly recommend "The Glass Castle." That's good reading. This just seemed overly simplistic and tidy. There were so many details missing. With all the talk about race, it seems strange that I was confused for for a lot of the book about what race the main character even was. I didn't feel like I really got a grasp on any of the characters. I'll be interested to go to book club and get an idea of what I'm missing here, because I seem to be in the minority.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

Ellen Foster is a little girl around 10 or 11 years old living in some unnamed city in the Deep South. I think the time frame might be the late sixties to early seventies. She’s obviously very poor, her mother suffers from a heart condition and her daddy suffers from drunkenness (tongue in cheek); he’s a real SOB who makes Ellen’s mother’s and Ellen’s life quite difficult.

Her only friend is Starletta, a little black girl neighbor about her same age. Ellen has to come to terms with her friendship because Ellen has been taught all the classic prejudices common to poor white southerners of that era.

Her mother dies, her daddy abuses her, and she pretty much is raising herself, going to school, and figuring things out. The entire book is first person from this little girl’s viewpoint. And it’s such a heartbreaking and heartwarming story. Has been sitting on my bookshelf forever, a slim volume of 125 pages. I read on Goodreads that this author published a sequel a number of years later. I’ll be checking it out soon!

This was a book that I was to read for my English class in school this year. It was okay but nothing more. The story felt very flat and it felt like any old story, nothing special. Also, the fact that there were no quotation marks killed me. It took me forever to read because I kept having to decipher what she was actually saying versus what she was just thinking. That was a major issue I had with this book. In the end, it was an okay book that was nothing more. I wouldn't really recommend this one.

A female Huckleberry Finn (abusive father, childhood trauma, black best friend, plucky independence, southern malapropisms) without the river and the raft.

This is an example of how to do present tense well. The novel is a mix of past and present tenses and it's seamlessly interwoven - I loathe present tense and I barely noticed it.