(These have been collected from readers)
A hop, skip and a jump from here
What the Sam Hill–?
What in tarnation–?
I’ll be a monkey’s uncle
A month of Sundays
Once in a blue moon
Can’t teach an old dog new tricks
No fool like an old fool
Raining cats and dogs
Curiosity killed the cat
Hold your horses
For Pete’s sake
For the love of Mike
For crying out loud
You can’t get blood from a turnip
Blood is thicker than water
Blood will tell
So help me Hannah
Jeepers!
Jeepers Creepers!
I’ll betcha two bits
Up the creek without a paddle
Scarce as hens’ teeth
Hubba hubba
My stars and garters
Hotter than a gangster’s pistol
It’s the cat’s pajamas…the cat’s meow…
the bee’s knees…
He’d lie when the truth would serve him better
She looked as if she’d been dragged through
a knothole backwards
It’s a pip or pipperoo
There are more hoses’ behinds than
there are horses”
Whipper-snapper
I’ve got a hitch in my git-along
It’s not where you sit on Sundays but
where you stand the rest of the week
I believe that in the misty future when such matters are considered, the overshadowing historical feature of the twentieth century will not be the unleashing of the atom or the rise of the Third World, but the rise of the Second World – women. The novels I write, whether comic or serious, deal with the oftentimes subtle, unconscious, evolving image women have of themselves – women who do not ordinarily or consciously perceive themselves as feminist, but whose perspectives and expectations have been radically, irrevocably altered by feminist politics and the mid-century emergence of the female work force.
What are the new conflicts and satisfactions, losses and rewards – emotional, intellectual, as well as tangible – for the ubiquitous, nonexistent ‘average woman’? This sort of question underlies the kind of intimate, personally detailed novel I enjoy writing and reading.
The folks at Fountain Lake Readers have put together a terrific collection of discussion questions for book groups reading ‘The Cape Ann.’ The collection is in PDF format, and can be found here.
Have a wonderful family saying? I’d love to hear about it. I’m setting up a section of this site to collect and publish bits of wisdom from your old Aunt Sue.
“Gardenias proves that even life’s missed opportunities can offer some of the most rewarding story lines.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Fans won’t be disappointed.”
St. Paul Pioneer Press
It’s 1942, just a month after the United States entered World War II. Lark, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty are in a station changing trains, leaving their lives in Harvester, Minnesota behind, and waiting for the train going to Los Angeles. Young men — soldiers — swarm the platform, heading off to war. Against this dramatic backdrop, Gardenias revisits Faith Sullivan’s most beloved characters from The Cape Ann, taking them from their hometown to new lives, new dreams, and new risks. Arlene has left her husband behind after he gambled away the money she’d saved to finally build the Cape Ann house of her and Lark’s Depression-era dreams. As a new life takes shape in San Diego in a wartime housing project full of neighbors they know little about, Lark wonders, as does the reader, if a dream means losing everything of value or finally finding it.