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Ordinary Springs

Ordinary Springs

Genre:

Publisher:

Language:

Historical Fiction

Putnam/Berkley

english

In 1960s Ordinary Springs, Florida, Dory Gamble is raised from infancy by her father in his small-town hardware store after her mother leaves. Over a decade later,  still struggling to overcome her feelings of betrayal over this abandonment, Dory finds her life turned upside down once again by the arrival of strangers next door — an ailing man dependent on his beautiful and sophisticated wife —  and her father’s growing relationship with his new female neighbor. Dory’s own relationship with lifelong best friend Pearce is evolving into something else, too. But then, in one shattering act she mistakenly sees as kindness, Dory nearly brings the world crashing down on them all. In the aftermath her  father calls the sheriff and she’s sent to a reform school for girls by her father, but soon escapes and endeavors to make her own way in the world at 15 — unevenly at first, but gradually with more success despite many trials along the way. When at last she endeavors to go home again, though, she learns that everything she believed about her parents was a lie. And now she must decide how to live with that unwelcome and devastating truth.

REVIEWS

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.

From Booklist

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

From Kirkus Reviews

Teenager grows up fast in small Florida town—and then the plot really takes off in Hart’s second outing (after Waterwoman, 2002).

In expressive prose that avoids “southern fiction” preciousness, Hart brings us Dory Gamble, daughter of Owen, hardware-store owner in sleepy Ordinary Springs. Dory’s earliest memories are fraught with questions. Where did her mother, Vera, disappear with that suitcase after telling toddler Dory a bedtime story? Why did her father bury her mother’s clothes? Why are her parents’ former best friends, the McMillans, now standoffish? Why is her father so distant? Dory works as her father’s housekeeper and helper at the store, and she assumes she’s first in his secretive heart—until the Yankee city-slicker Fitzgeralds move in across the street. Dory realizes with horror that her father, oblivious to the blandishments of every other female in town, is falling hard for the Capri-clad, spike-heeled, Dali-loving Myra Fitzgerald, whose WWII vet husband, Frank, is bedridden. While Owen and Myra are otherwise occupied in another room, Dory unwittingly becomes an accessory to Frank’s suicide. And then, when her father announces that he’s to marry Myra, Dory loses her already tenuous grip on self-restraint and, the night of her 16th birthday, has an assignation with childhood friend Pearce McMillan under a carnival truck, empties the cash register at Owen’s store, and tries to run away, only to be apprehended by the sheriff, who has zeroed in on her role in Frank’s death. From there, it’s on to reform school, escape (her expertise with hardware serves Dory well), a stint at a roadside diner and tourist trap, the birth of daughter Rose, an affair with a half-Seminole ’gator trapper, and a newfound determination to return to Ordinary Springs for a vigorous spring-cleaning of her father’s house and its resident demons.

Unerring eye for 1950s detail lifts this soap-operatic story above the ordinary, even if the plot springs are a bit too visible.

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Waterwoman

Waterwoman

Genre:

Publisher:

Language:

ISBN:

Historical Fiction

Putnam/Northampton House Press

english

‎ 978-1937997595

SYNOPSIS: Even as a child, plain, boyish Annie Revels had everyone’s role in life figured out. Everyone’s, that is, except her own. Her mother was sickly and needed to be taken care of. Her little sister Rebecca was remarkably beautiful, where Annie was not. Her father was a waterman, a free-looking life Annie deeply envied and could’ve had, if only she’d been born a son.

Tiny, remote Yaupon Island knows nothing of the partying, gin-soaked Roaring Twenties which grip the rest of the country. The Revels family depends on the coastal waters to make a living, and tragedy is always only a bad storm away. As Annie notes, “In order to live on the Shore, you need to understand that good weather always follows bad.” But when her father dies, suddenly it falls to Annie to take his place aboard the oyster boat and support what’s left of the family.

Out there, she finds the only life she thought she could ever really fit into: being a waterman. Until one day, out on the water, she meets Nathan . . .

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

From BOOKLIST: Growing up on an island off the coast of Virginia during and just after World War I, Annie Revels longs to work on the water like her father. Occasionally he will allow her to help him search for crabs and oysters, but he tells her that it is a man’s work and that her destiny lies elsewhere. But when he dies in an accident, it falls to Annie to care for her delicate mother and younger sister, Rebecca. Annie takes up her father’s work, and soon she meets Nathan Combs out on the water. The two become lovers, and for the first time in her life, Annie desires something beyond her work on the sea. She decides to bring Nathan home to her family, though she is reluctant to introduce him to Rebecca, of whom she has always been envious. But the meeting goes well, and Nathan becomes a regular visitor at the Revels house, until Rebecca shares shocking news with Annie that destroys her happiness. A gripping story with an admirable, complex heroine. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From PUBLISHERS WEEKLY: Alternately understated and melodramatic, Hart’s debut reads like a Greek tragedy crossed with Peyton Place. For most of her 20 years, Annie Revels (“the sister who was never much to look at”) has taken a back seat to her beautiful sister, Rebecca, four years her junior. They live with their gruff and leathery father, George, and their mentally fragile “Mam” on a small island off the Virginia coast in the early 1900s. They receive no formal education, so Rebecca spends her days lolling about as Mam’s favorite daughter, while Annie prefers roughing it on the water with her fisherman father, trapping the crabs and oysters that humbly sustain the family. But George warns her that this can’t be her future: “Women and water? That’s black gum against thunder.” Hart’s grasp of the turn of the century regional vernacular lends an authentic tone to the narrative. Equally impressive is her research on the rules of the water and the lifestyle of watermen. After her father’s death, Annie bucks society and becomes a waterwoman so she can care for her helpless invalid mother and sister, “oversized children I had suddenly birthed, innocent beyond reason and without a clue.” She has resigned herself to supporting her family for the rest of her days when she’s hit by a squall called Nathan Combs, a handsome tour boat captain who capsizes Annie’s ideas about herself and her future. At this juncture, the novel becomes a gothic page-turner and a tear-jerking drama. Hart reaches surprising emotional depths with her exploration of sibling rivalry, familial commitment and social taboos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From THE BALTIMORE SUN: Pure as the waters of the pre-industrial Chesapeake . . . utterly convincing and beautifully sensual. You feel the shell cuts, the pull of the nets.
From SOUTHERN LIVING: Lenore Hart’s story of love and betrayal yields as many surprises as the sea itself.
From THE WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL: Annie’s strength carries the novel, without resorting to cloying moments or tear-jerking cliches.
From THE SALISBURY NC POST: [Her] skill as a novelist lies in the respect she has for the form and for the words themselves . . . Like the watermen that people her novel, Hart has learned the tools of her craft.
From LUCE WORLDWIDE WEB: Annie tells her story in the hushed yet urgent voice of a sinner begging forgiveness . . . Hart throws in dramatic twists and turns that keep the reader voraciously turning the pages for more.
From TOPEKA CAPITAL-JOURNAL: A gripping story, colorful and sensuous and easy to read.
From FT. LAUDERDALE SUN-SENTINEL: Hart creates a believable world where tragedy does not always equal hopelessness, a place where you don’t always get what you want, but if you’re strong, you find reasons to go on living anyway.

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Colony One Mars

Colony One Mars

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ISBN:

Science Fiction, Thriller & Suspense

Outer Planet Media

english

978-1530558995

How can a colony on Mars survive when the greatest danger on the planet is humanity itself.

All contact is lost with the first human colony on Mars during a long, intense sandstorm. Satellite imagery of the aftermath shows extensive damage to the facility, and the fifty-four colonists who called it home are presumed dead. Three years later, a new mission sets down on the planet surface to investigate what remains of the derelict site. But, it’s not long before they realize the colony is not as lifeless as everyone thought. Someone is still alive — hiding out somewhere.

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The Maid of Lindal Hall

The Maid of Lindal Hall

Genre:

Language:

Family Life Fiction, Historical Fiction

english

Katherine Mezzacappa writing as Katie Hutton

Barrow-in-Furness, 1920: what is the terrible secret that put little Molly Dubber in a children’s home? And when she goes into service, what is it that reduces her master to screams in the dead of night?

Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill

Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill

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Publisher:

Language:

ISBN:

Historical Fiction

Zaffre

english

9781838775834

Katherine Mezzacappa writing as Katie Hutton

1897: Annie is forced to leave the family farm in County Down, starting again in Cumberland as a spinner, only to find Ulster’s fault lines have crossed the Irish Sea too. Can her love for Robert survive the sectarian divide?

The Gypsy’s Daughter

The Gypsy’s Daughter

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Publisher:

Language:

ISBN:

Historical Fiction

Zaffre

english

9781838770372

Katherine Mezzacappa writing as Katie Hutton

Can talented Harmony ‘Harry’ Loveridge overcome the tragedy of her past to build a new life for herself in 1950s Nottingham? And who will she build it with, the brooding and mercurial Max or Ned, lathe operator and miner’s son?

The Gypsy Bride

The Gypsy Bride

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Publisher:

Language:

ISBN:

Historical Fiction

Zaffre

english

9781838770259

Katherine Mezzacappa writing as Katie Hutton

Oxfordshire 1919: Heartbroken Ellen lost her fiancé to the trenches. But when she finds love again with the mysterious Gypsy Sam Loveridge, both their communities do all they can to tear them apart.

The Ballad of Mary Kearney

The Ballad of Mary Kearney

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Publisher:

Language:

ISBN:

Historical Fiction

Addison and Highsmith

english

9781592115242

In County Down in 1767, a nobleman secretly marries his servant, in defiance of law, class and religion. Can their love survive tumultuous times? Publication date January 2025.

The Maiden of Florence

The Maiden of Florence

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Publisher:

Language:

ISBN:

Historical Fiction

Fairlight

english

9781914148507

1584: an unsuspecting girl is plucked from an orphanage on the orders of the Medici family, with the promise of a dowry and a husband. Only when it is too late is she told how she must earn them. A Renaissance #MeToo based on historical events.

Saga

Saga

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Publisher:

Language:

ISBN:

Science Fiction

O'Brien Press / Penguin USA

english

9781847174185

How do we know we are real and not just some character in an elaborate game?

In the virtual world of Saga, Ghost is a 15-year-old airboarding anarcho-punk, with no past, no memories, only a growing realization of her own strange abilities. But who is she really and why is she becoming embroiled in a battle with the warped leader of Saga – the Dark Queen? How have Erik and Cindella Dragonslayer fared since their adventures in Epic.

And what happens if you dare to reach outside your world, or to question your identity? Is that simply the road to madness, death and destruction?

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