From Publishers Weekly
Dory Gamble's mother disappeared when Dory was just two, leaving Dory and her father in tiny Ordinary Springs, Fla., where lovelorn town ladies circled like buzzards, but the abandoned twosome counted only on each other. Hart (
Waterwoman) spins a homespun tale in fine Southern soap opera tradition, as Dory grows up and goes a little wild in the 1950s. The trouble starts when sultry Myra Fitzgerald and her invalid war hero husband, Frank, move in next door. One night, as Myra and Dory's father explore their feelings for each other in the next room, Dory finds herself an accidental accomplice in Frank's suicide. Haunted by guilt and alienated from her father, Dory submits to the advances of a childhood friend the night she turns 16. Her plan is to skip town with money she stole from her dad's hardware store, but she winds up back at home, with the authorities fingering her for Frank's death. It's reform school time—until Dory escapes and winds up at a roadside diner and reptile farm where she works as a waitress, lives in a tepee and gives birth to a daughter. More surprises are still to come—including one about her mother. Gritty, fierce and a little over the top plotwise, Hart's novel is a fine vintage portrait of a tough girl whom life teaches to be tougher.
(Jan. 4) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Hart's gripping follow-up to her debut,
Waterwoman (2002), is set in the small town of Ordinary Springs, Florida, in the 1950s. Dory Gamble's mother left when Dory was two, and her father--handsome, emotionally withdrawn Owen, who runs the local hardware store--raised her alone. No one comes between them until beautiful Myra Fitzgerald and her dying husband, Frank, move in next door when Dory is 15. Owen and Myra begin a passionate affair, enraging Dory and leading to her own sexual experimentation with her best friend, Pearce. When Dory wakes one night to find her father gone and the Fitzgeralds' door unlocked, she ventures into their house and sets off a chain of events that will change her life dramatically and take her away from her home in Ordinary Springs, though not in the way she has always imagined. As she did with
Waterwoman, Hart tells such an alluring tale that the reader won't want to put the novel down. With accessible, inviting prose, Hart creates in Dory a character both fallible and completely sympathetic.
Kristine HuntleyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
