In her second novel, following her poignant debut work Ellen Foster (1987), Kaye Gibbons reinforces her adeptness at portraying the contrasting and often unexpected social awareness and ineptitude of humanity. Her depiction of the marriage of Ruby Pitt Woodrow and Blinking Jack Ernest Stokes reveals the unbreakable connections between people and exposes universal social issues that concern people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Although some characters may be pretentious, Gibbons's fictional world is not the venue of southern belles. The daughter of land owners in rural Georgia, near fictional Shelbourne, Ruby first marries a migrant worker, then a tenant farmer. She initially chooses to marry beneath her social class because of a misguided notion of romantic love based on movies she has seen and cravings for travel and adventure. Mistreated and scorned, the widowed Ruby discovers love and happiness with salt-of-the-earth Jack and realizes that the ordinary, banal...