Quotes from Fran Ross

Louise was once challenged to name a food she did not like. She paused to consider. That pause was now in its fifteenth year.

A word about weather There is no weather per se in this book. Passing reference is made to weather in a few instances. Assume whatever season you like throughout. Summer makes the most sense in a book of this length. That way, pages do not have to be used up describing people taking off and putting on overcoats.

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings.

Louise Clark's southern accent was as thick as hominy grits. No one else in the Philadelphia branch of her family had such an accent. Her mother and father had dropped theirs as soon as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line.