Gardenias

A Novel

It is 1942, only a month after the United States has joined World War II. Lark, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty are leaving Harvester, Minnesota, breaking away—as Arlene might put it—from their Depression-Era lives to seek new opportunities in California. Arlene has left her husband Stanley—he gambled away the money she saved to build the house of her and Lark’s dreams. She drags Lark and Betty unwillingly in her wake.

Desperately homesick, but also enthralled by the soldiers on the train and a glimpse of an elegant woman she feels must be a movie star, nine-year-old Lark is amazed to hear her mother tell a bald-faced lie as the train chugs into San Diego. This is a side of her mother she has not seen. Arlene, normally not “a woman of ruses,” soon procures a duplex in a wartime housing project and an office job with Consolidated Aircraft. Lark, increasingly alone at home while her mother and aunt work, learns to navigate her new neighborhood—to be wary of the boys who roam in threatening packs, to tolerate Shirley, an unkempt girl everyone dotes on, and to watch with interest the lives of the other adults nearby, themselves transplants from Chicago, North Dakota, and other points on the map.

Invite Faith Sullivan to your next book club gathering!