Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

For my outside reading I have been working on Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons.  This novel is an extremely depressing yet eye-opening look at an abusive family through a child’s eyes.  The naïvety of the child Ellen is what makes this novel all the more heart-wrenching.  She believes her mother has “romantic fever” rather than “rheumatic fever” and therefore believes her mother will be completely fine once she gets over this “romantic fever,” however this is not the case.  Her mother over-doses on pills in front of the drunk, good-for-nothing father and begins to pass out.  Ellen shows extreme maturity here when she tells her mother that in order to get better she must throw up the pills; her dad, on the other hand, tells Ellen that the pills the mother took are not bad pills.  He convinces Ellen that the mother simply needs to lay down on the bed for a little while and then she will be better.  That night Ellen cuddles up to her mother and feels her mother’s last heart beat. She solemnly states, “My heart can be the one that beats.  And hers has stopped.”  Ellen realizes that if it was not for her father, her mother would have stayed alive and then states, “Damn him to the bottom of Hell.”  This remark is not one to typically be spoken by a young girl, however the novel does state that she hates her father since the opening line is: “When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”  Though thoughts like this never cross a normal child’s mind, since it is usually filled with thoughts of playing with friends and eating sweets, she cannot exactly be defined as a “normal” child.  After her mother dies, she takes the role of the mother and the daughter by buying Christmas presents for herself and wrapping them the night before.  She then proceeds to hide them and finds them in the morning with a look of shock on her face as if it were a surprise.  She flat out admits that she knows Santa Claus is not real, but the child inside her wants to keep that part of her childhood alive.  Just because Ellen is forced into adulthood, it does not necessarily mean she is ready for it.  In fact, she still enjoys acting as a child when she is not in her father’s house of horrors.  She goes horseback riding with her new friend Starletta who is young than her, but she is a friend nonetheless.  So far this book’s mood has seemed ever changing, which is quite confusing since it is about a young girl living a terrible life.  The novel will switch from sadness during the mother’s death to disbelief when the mothers death “finally shut [the father] up” to happiness when she is contemplating what to do with her day whether it be horseback riding or eating whatever her “new mama” is making in the kitchen.  This book has been quite an emotional roller coaster so far, but it has got me hooked and now I cannot put it down.