description: "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/wrenching novel...[Ellen Foster] is as much a part of the backwoods South as a Faulkner character and a good deal more endearing." 
title: Ellen Foster
titlecomplete: Ellen Foster
genres: Coming Of Age, Southern, Literary Fiction, School, Adult Fiction, Young Adult, Classics, Adult, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 30584
places: North Carolina
series: Ellen Foster
awards: awardedAt: 568022400000
name: Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awardedAt: 599644800000
name: Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
category: Fiction
publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.