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Summary
Summary
Two unforgettable characters, Jack Ernest Stokes, known as Blinking Jack, and his wife, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes, tell the story of their years together. Jack was forty and Ruby only twenty when they were married. For twenty-five years they lived together, man and wife, until Ruby died of lung cancer.
Author Notes
Kaye Gibbons was born on May 5, 1960 in Nash County, North Carolina. She received a bachelor's degree in American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first novel, Ellen Foster, was published in 1987. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was chosen as one of Oprah's Book Club Selections, and was adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. Her other novels include The Virtuous Woman, A Cure for Dreams, Sights Unseen, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, Divining Women, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, The Lunatics' Ball, and The Secret Devotions of Mary Magdalen. Her novel Charms for the Easy Life was also adapted into a made-for-television movie. She also received the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, which recognized her contribution to French Literature in 1996 and she received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 1998.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Jack Stokes and Ruby Pitt weave this strong, tightly knit love story in alternating chapters that begin when Jack, grieving over Ruby's death four months earlier, evokes the past. In flashbacks, the two richly cadenced Southern voices explore their vastly differing backgrounds, troubled histories and their unlikely but loving marriage. Born into a proud, prominent country family, coddled and adored, Ruby stuns her parents and two brothers by inexplicably running off with John Woodrow, a migrant worker who savagely abuses her. When John is killed in a brawl, Ruby, too proud to ask her family for help, begins doing housework for the wealthy Hoover family, where she meets Jack, a laconic, immensely capable tenant farmer on the Hoover land. He is 40; she is 20. Both lonely and vulnerable, they regard each other cautiously, carry on a wary courtship and embark on a firmly grounded marriage. The union is enriched by a small, supportive circle of friends, who, like the couple's landlord, Burr, are sharply etched and convincingly drawn. Gibbons, author of the critically praised Ellen Foster , has written a vivid, unsentimental, powerful novel. Literary Guild and Double day Book Club alternates. (Apr . ) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Gibbons returns with a new novel in the brief, bittersweet tradition of her earlier Ellen Foster [BKL S 1 87]. In alternating chapters, Ruby and Jack tell of their lives and love for each other. Jack is the victim of an impoverished childhood. Ruby has suffered a disastrous first marriage. She finds happiness with loving, affectionate Jack, though he is 20 years older, fat, and has a twitch. Even their love, though, is no match for life's tragedies: childlessness and Ruby's cancer. Gibbons allows her characters to describe misfortune with excruciating detail and matter-of-factness. The result is another heart-tugging quiet drama. Jack has Ellen Foster's soul--vulnerable, sweet, more knowing than appearance suggests. Ruby has the angelic kindness and domesticity of Ellen's foster mother. A subtle, evocative, and romantic novel. --Deb Robertson
School Library Journal Review
YA-- In alternating chapters, Ruby and Jack Stokes tell of their adult lives: her elopement and hellish life with an abusive migrant farmer, Ruby and Jack's meeting and subsequently happy marriage, and their relationships with Jack's landlord and friend, Burr; his self-centered wife and son; and June, his lovely daughter, whom the Stokes love dearly. Gibbons develops distinct voices for Ruby and Jack, and their reminiscences paint vibrant portraits of themselves and others. The story will prod readers to think about the nature of friendship and love.-- Alice Conlon, University of Houston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A straight and true, if somewhat unusual, love is at the heart of this sweet and folksy novella by the much celebrated author of Ellen Foster. Blinking Jack Ernest Stokes (""stokes the fire, stokes the stove, stokes the fiery furnace of hell!"") shares with his younger wife, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes, ""a quiet kind of love,"" born of Jack's essential goodness and Ruby's gratitude. When she first met Jack, her second husband, she was stuck in a horrible marriage to a drinking and cheating migrant worker, who had wooed her with lies and given her a mean and lowdown life. Before running off with nasty John Woodrow at 18, Ruby was the sheltered daughter of a modestly prosperous farmer, and planned on attending college. In one of her charming monologues (which alternate with Jack's), Ruby blames her movie-fed imagination for the mistake from which she cannot turn back. And Woodrow's taunts about Ruby's ""uppity"" background inspires her only vice, the smoking that eventually leads to lung cancer at 45, much to the dismay of gentle Jack, himself 65 at the time. While Ruby's chapters are told in anticipation of her impending death, Jack's look back from the months after the fact, recalling Woodrow's timely murder in a pool-hall fight, Jack and Ruby's odd courtship, and their 25 years of a loving marriage. A tall and skinny tenant farmer, Jack works for his buddy Burr Stanley, a former tenant who married the spoiled, slovenly, knocked-up daughter of the landlord. As much a testament to the unlikely love of Jack and Ruby, this quirky little book also captures in its final chapter--the only one in the third person--the depths of Jack's loneliness and despair after Ruby's gone. Other than his devoted friendship, and a share in his daughter's love (Jack and Ruby couldn't have their own kids), Burr gives Jack the only thing left--a piece of land to call his own. Gibbons flirts with kitsch--one memory recalls a six-year-old girl in a bedful of puppies--but her good country sense argues for a grace and virtue beyond mere sentimentality, and unaffected by religiosity. There's much charm--and a lot of wisdom--in her rural romance. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Alternating chapters narrated by Ruby Stokes (who is dying of cancer at 45) with those told by her husband, Blinking Jack, after her death, Gibbons creates a scrapbook of their quarter century together as tenant farmers. Too old and tough to be endearing like the protagonist of Ellen Foster ( LJ 4/15/87), the Stokeses are no less honest and vivid as they consider the value of a good mate or good soil. Gibbons again flawlessly reproduces the humor and idiom of rural eastern North Carolina in Ruby's proper country dialect and Jack's peculiarly awful grammar. Recommended for public libraries and collections of regional fiction.-- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
She hasn't been dead four months and I've already eaten to the bottom of the deep freeze. I even ate the green peas. Used to I wouldn't turn my hand over for green peas. My whole name is Blinking Jack Ernest Stokes, stokes the fire, stokes the stove, stokes the fiery furnace of hell! I've got a nerve problem in back of the face so I blink. June nicknamed me for it when she was little. My wife's name was Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes. She was a real pretty woman. Used to I used to lay up in bed and say, "Don't take it off in the dark! I want to see it all!" Ruby died with lung cancer in March. She wasn't but forty-five, young woman to die so early. She used to tell me, she'd say, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I imagine I'll stop smoking about the time you stop drinking." June's daddy, Burr, told me one time people feed on each other's bad habits, which might could be true except for one thing, I'm not really what I would call a drinking man. I hardly ever take a drink except when I need one. But Ruby died and they laid her out and crossed her hands over her bosom, and I said to them, "I never saw her sleeping like that." They said but that's the way everybody was laid, so I said, "Fine then, I'll let her be." I did lean over in the coffin though and fix her fingers so the nicotine stains wouldn't show. Ruby had the creamiest soft skin and I hated to have brown spots ruin her for people. Suppose you went to view somebody who'd died being shot or stabbed somewhere so you'd notice. Don't you know they'd fill in with some kind of spackle and smooth it over to match him? Sure they would! Same thing only different with Ruby's two ashy-smelling fingers. God, you ought to've seen her in the hospital, weak, trying to sit up, limp as a dishrag. She'd lost down so much, looked like she'd literally almost shook all the meat off, all that coughing and spewing up she'd done. If you want to feel helpless as a baby sometime, you go somewhere and watch such as that. Seemed like every time she'd cough a cold shudder'd run up and down me. I sat with her long as they'd let me that night, then I had to leave. I stuck my head up under her tent and said to her, "'Night, 'night, Ruby. I'm headed back to the Ponderosa with Burr. I'll see you first thing in the morning." Then she put those two ashy-smelling fingers up to her mouth like either she was blowing me a kiss or telling me to hush a little. And while I was looking at her and trying to figure out which one she meant, I realized she wasn't motioning love or to hush to me. She was wanting a cigarette, asking me for one. I thought, Well I will be damned. And I said, Hard as that woman worked to get over too good a life then too bad a life, what a pity, what a shame to see this now. I hated to but I had to call it selfish, not like the Ruby I knew. But I suppose when you're that bad off and you're not here, not gone either, I suppose you can get to the point that you are all that matters to yourself, and thinking about yourself is the last thing left you can remember how to do. So you're bound to go on and forgive it. And after it all, after it's all said and done, I'll still have to say, Bless you, Ruby. You were a fine partner, and I miss you. Excerpted from A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.