Late at night outside Mariana, Florida, in the Pine Hills School for Girls, I wake to screaming. The room's dark, but when I sit up in my narrow, sagging single a light hurts my eyes. Not the moon, but a yellow security bulb outside the mesh-screened window.
More screams, blows, footsteps pounding down the corridor. The voices belong to two girls who share the dorm room down the hall. Tonight each claims the other stole her lipstick, her magazine, her boyfriend, her life. I lie back and try not to hear. To listen instead to the soft breathing of my roommates, who seem to sleep like babies, untroubled at least by night.
Past time to sleep, yet I can't seem to rest. I want to go back to the beginning, back to Ordinary Springs, and start my life over. But I'm not that same Dory Gamble, the sixteen year old girl hustled from town by the sheriff in the middle of one night. The nosy, awkward girl who didn't fit in, who screwed up her life. And others along the way.
Wish I could turn
out that
damn light.
I'm sixteen and pregnant, soon to be a mother. Why do I still feel like a two-year-old sometimes? I need sleep, have to get up early in the morning. Shouldn't be lying awake thinking about the far-off past, another town, a time when I was a baby myself. But then, that was the last night I still had a mother of my own.
ALA BOOKLIST
review:
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emotionally withdrawn Owen, who runs the local hardware store--raised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
Huntley.
© American Library Association. All rights reserved
VIRGINIA NOVELIST WRITES FLORIDA
COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL
By Susan Weaver
Lenore Hart’s first novel, Waterwoman, (Penguin/Berkley,
2001), brought
Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the 1920's to vivid life. Hart was
chosen as one of the five most promising writers in the country for
2002 by Poets and Writers magazine. Now, with Ordinary Springs,
Hart, a native
of Winter Garden, moves into her home territory - into the 1960's, and
the heart of a Florida girl just old enough to turn her life upside
down.
The motherless narrator, 16-year-old Eudora (Dory) Gamble of the
fictional town of Ordinary Springs, "a droplet in the navel of
Florida," tells us exactly how she’s feeling. But what may
initially seem like the typical story of a troubled teen turns out to
be a great deal more.
When Dory gets caught up in helping her bedridden neighbor, Korean War
vet Frank Fitzgerald, her life’s path veers dramatically. When
Fitzgerald is found dead by his wife (who, incidentally, has been
dating Dory’s single father), the local sheriff wants to know who gave
him the overdose. Dory runs into the arms of her long-time
friend, Pearce, a liaison that creates another challenge – a new baby.
As events and decisions tumble over each other, Dory learns to survive
on her own, and make a life for herself and her daughter. Her
picaresque voyage through 1960's Florida includes a grim institution
for “troubled” girls, a traveling carnival, an alligator farm, a
half-Seminole boyfriend, some amateur fortune telling, and finally, a
traveler’s welcome. In her Odyssean return to Ordinary Springs,
Dory finds a sadly changed home town, a sick parent, and possibly, a
chance at redemption. And finally, the solution to a riddle
that’s plagued her since babyhood – how could her own mother have
simply abandoned her, so many years before?
from The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, VA:
The characters along Dory’s journey vary widely –– from her
introverted, hardware-obsessed father, Owen, to big-hearted Ruby
Sebring, the woman who takes Dory in and helps deliver her child.
She learns from each as she matures, some of the lessons good, some not
so good. Throughout her story, there are frequent reminders of
how many consequences one rash action can have.
A fifth-generation Floridian of Irish, Welsh, and
Cherokee heritage, Lenore Hart holds degrees from the University of
Central Florida, Florida State University, and Old Dominion
University. Her work has been published in the US, Canada, and
Norway. She’s been a National Endowment for the Arts artist in
residence and a visiting writer at various colleges, including Florida
State University, The U.S. Naval Academy, George Mason
University, and Old Dominion University. She’s featured in the
syndicated PBS series “Writer To Writer.” She co-authored a
children's book, T. Rex at Swan Lake, in 2004. A young adult
novel, The Treasure of Savage Island, is scheduled for publication this
September by Dutton. Hart will be the Writer in Residence at The New
College of Florida in Sarasota this coming semester.
Hart has created a strong character in Dory and a
realistic, unrestrained story. Noteworthy for its exceptional prose,
Ordinary Springs captures the readers attention from page one, which
begins with these lines: "A fresh-water spring makes a path nearly as
twisted as the ones people choose. It flows underground, then
above. Sometimes pure, sometimes tainted with dirt or poison or
trash. But though its course is neither straight nor predicable,
the spring must keep on flowing whether it wants to or not."
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