Ella seems like a heroine in a Joni Mitchell song --- she makes up a world of rose cultivation and linen dresses to impress her socially-aware mother back home and buys clothes at a thrift store for herself and her daughter in order to fool the family when they go to visit. But after a disastrous attempt at reconciliation following the freak death of her sister, Ella starts to literally "bloom." She learns that what she is is a good person, not some perfected mirror image of her mother. She learns a lesson from her intelligent and caring daughter and ends up as ELLA IN BLOOM.

There are many stories out there about the power of one's family's expectations on the person one becomes in later life, but rarely do they offer such a shattering and yet utterly readable portrayal of one woman's growth. Unlike the flash-in-the-pan heroines of many single-girls-in-the-city stories popular in contemporary novels, ELLA IN BLOOM gives us a woman who is flawed and full of fault but who catches on to the right path eventually, while the fake rose-covered walls around her are torn down one by one.

Hearon, a veteran novelist of some 15-plus books, is so tuned into the heart of her heroine that Ella seems like the desperate yet somehow together next-door neighbor any of us could be living alongside of these days. With a provocative cover and a smooth writing style, ELLA IN BLOOM is a wonderful book about the magic that happens when we learn to accept ourselves.