Gardenias: A Novel [Paperback]

Faith Sullivan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2006

A month after the United States enters World War II, the country is in upheaval — and so is the Erhardt family. Nine-year-old Lark, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty are heading for San Diego, far away from Harvester, Minnesota and Arlene’s shiftless husband. In the booming wartime economy, Arlene and Betty are soon at work, leaving Lark alone to explore their new neighborhood, a wartime housing project full of others with similarly uprooted lives. Away from prying eyes and small town expectations, the two women begin to forge new lives and new dreams — dreams that Lark isn’t always comfortable with. This richly detailed novel, told through Lark’s observant eyes, reflects the era’s tumultuous events in the everyday dramas of its memorable, finely nuanced characters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Abandoning Depression-ravaged Minnesota and the alcoholic husband who drank away the family savings, Arlene Erhardt moves to California in early 1942 in search of a new life, bringing along her sister Betty and daughter Lark, the too-precocious narrator of this tale of independence, loyalty, hope and crushed dreams. The Erhardts land in a San Diego housing project, where Lark is left alone to sort out her new world while Betty and Arlene work. Though Lark makes a less than credible nine-year old (her habit of reading a dictionary notwithstanding), she endears herself to the reader through her innocence and curiosity.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Lark Ann Erhardt, her mother, Arlene, and her aunt Betty join the thousands of people migrating to California during the 1940s war years. Her parents' marriage is in disarray, as told in Sullivan's previous novel, The Cape Ann (1988). Arlene and Betty are resolute in their desire to establish new lives for themselves and to find work in the war plants now desperate for workers. Nine-year-old Lark is a keen observer and patient narrator of life's twists and incongruities as she settles in to life in a San Diego housing project with the two women. Always hoping for reconciliation between her parents, Lark is confused by her circumstances but is a resilient child protective of her real and her extended family of new friends. Sullivan fills Lark's world with flawed, complex adults as well as other children. As all children do, Lark learns that some decisions and events are incomprehensible and irrevocably change one's life. Sullivan's leisurely pacing provides a quiet view into Lark's fears, hopes, and growing maturity. Laurie Sundborg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions; First Trade Paper Edition edition (August 23, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571310525
• ISBN-13: 978-1571310521
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #362,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A moving continuation to Sullivan's CAPE ANN, January 10, 2006

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gardenias: A Novel (Hardcover)

Faith Sullivan has written two previous novels set in the fictional small town of Harvester, Minnesota. Her first, THE CAPE ANN, was published in 1988 and focused on six-year-old Lark Erhardt, who narrated the story of her mother's desire for a better life and her father's repeated shattering of those dreams. Readers who fell in love with Lark's combination of innocence and observation, as well as with Sullivan's old-fashioned storytelling abilities, have had to wait a long time to find out more about Lark's story. Now, with GARDENIAS, the wait is finally over.

The novel begins in 1942, as nine-year-old Lark and her newly separated mother and aunt Betty travel by train from southern Minnesota to San Diego. Eager to obtain war work and as much distance as possible from her estranged husband, Lark's mother finds a good office job and a small house. While her mother concentrates on making a comfortable and beautiful home, and her aunt focuses on her rapidly advancing career in fashion, Lark comes to know the motley group of residents, many of them Midwestern transplants, inhabiting their housing project.

Among these neighbors is Shirley, a girl who's Lark's age. Although the bossy, overbearing girl often clashes with Lark, the adults in Lark's life warm quickly to Shirley. Neglected at best and abused at worst, Shirley also shows promising musical talent when she takes piano lessons from Lark's mother and another neighbor. Uncomfortably wise beyond her years, Shirley clues the more innocent Lark into the ways of the world.

During her few years in San Diego, Lark loses much of her innocence, in the wake of the war, her mother's secret love for another man, and her father's increasingly menacing letters. Her narrative voice, which combines a childlike impressionability with keen observation, is still winning, and readers can observe Lark growing into the writer she is obviously meant to become.

Although Sullivan's portrayal of wartime San Diego lacks some of the intimacy of her portrayals of her native southern Minnesota, her affection for the Erhardt family remains and will once again draw readers new and old into the lives of this small, determined and loving family.


--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read!, November 28, 2005

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gardenias: A Novel (Hardcover)

The long-awaited sequel to Cape Ann has finally arrived.

Lark Erhardt, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty arrive in San Diego in 1942, breaking away from their Depression-era lives in Harvester, Minnesota with abusive, gambling Willie Erhardt.

Aunt Betty is still suffering from the death of her baby and the abandonment of her husband, Stanley.

Arlene holds the family together, finding housing in a wartime project and a job as a secretary at Consolidated Aircraft. Betty finds work as a clerk in a big department store.

Lark must cope with a gang of violent and ruthlessly vicious boys who threaten her. She deals with it by mostly staying at home, writing and hiding.

Lark finds a magical painting of a cabin in the woods, and imagines it is in Minnesota and that she is living there. She starts fourth grade and is terribly alone, only her writing to hold on to. She misses Minnesota, but not her father. They attempt to make a home, planting a gardenia bush and some daisies that Lark carefully waters every day.

Betty and Arlene befriend lonely sailors, giving them home-cooked meals on the weekend. Shirley, another misfit girl, finds food, praise, and a safe haven with Lark's family from her own very dysfunctional family life. Shirley is prickly and even sometimes nasty to Lark. Almost a second child in the family, Shirley takes piano lessons from Aunt Betty, and the family helps clothe her and finance her further musical education. For Shirley, music is an escape--just as Lark's writing is a refuge.

Upheavals come in many forms: Willie comes to California to demand their return; Uncle Stanley shows up, telling them he has enlisted. Neighbors in the project become dear friends, as Lark learns their stories and tells them hers. Finally several events shatter all their lives, and change them forever.

Armchair Interviews says: Sullivan is a wonderful and evocative storyteller, making the 1940s and wartime San Diego, the labor movement, the death of Roosevelt, and social upheaval of women in the workforce, the music and the fear, all come alive.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, deeply satisfying novel, October 29, 2005

By 

Helen Sheehy - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gardenias: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved GARDENIAS. I could not put it down. With consummate skill and grace and the easy mastery of a mature writer, Faith Sullivan creates and populates a world that lives and breathes. The novel is funny and moving and suspenseful and deeply wise--both a pageturner and a literary classic. Read this novel, give it to your friends, pass it on to your children.