Gardenias
A month after the United States joins World War II, nine-year-old Lark, her mother, Arlene, and her Aunt Betty migrate to San Diego from Harvester, Minnesota, leaving Lark’s gambling father and their Depression-era memories behind. Desperately homesick but enthralled by the young soldiers on the train and a glimpse of an elegant woman she’s sure must be a movie star, Lark hears her mother tell a bald-faced lie to a stranger that leads them to a duplex in a housing project with other uprooted families from all over the country.
While her mother works with Consolidated Aircraft and her aunt takes a job at a local department store, Lark, increasingly alone, learns to navigate her new neighborhood—to be wary of the boys who roam in threatening packs, and to tolerate Shirley, an unkempt girl with a love for piano—and to find solace in her fantasies of the elegant woman from the train, the stories she writes in her room, and the scraggly gardenia bush in the side yard she waters each day, wondering if it will ever bloom. Returning to the beloved characters of Faith Sullivan’s best-selling The Cape Ann, Gardenias is a touching and bittersweet coming of age story.
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Faith Sullivan
Faith Sullivan is the author of many novels, including Gardenias, The Cape Ann, What a Woman Must Do, and, most recently, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse. An indefatigable champion of literary culture and her fellow writers, she has visited with hundreds of book clubs and lives in Minneapolis.
Praise and Prizes
You Might Enjoy
Widowed, penniless, responsible for her beloved baby boy, and subject to the small-town gossip of Harvester, Minnesota—Nell Stillman’s lot is not an easy one. Yet she finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life awakened by the…
One winter’s night, Ruby Drake’s beloved parents perish in an accident—and suddenly, Ruby finds herself penniless and nearly alone in the world.
When Celia Canby and her husband are killed in a car accident, her aunt Kate and cousin Harriet are left to raise Celia’s daughter. Ten years later, it’s the 1950s, and the three generations of women are being drawn apart by life, loss, and new love…
An irreverent, darkly comic novel dissecting the misjudgments, hypocrisies, and occasional good motives that drive our politics and our journalism, as well as our most intimate personal relations.
At his desk one day, prominent Washington commentator…