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Critical Praise for Uncertain Ground

• Carolyn Osborn captures beautifully what it would have been like to be young, restless, confused, sunburned, maybe-in-love-and-maybe-not on Galveston Island in the long-ago nineteen-fifties. This is a timeless novel about a timeless place.

  — Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo

• With calm, descriptive elegance, Uncertain Ground paints both the conflicted restlessness of 20-year-old Texans in 1953, sprung south to the island for a month, and the haunting ever-shifting shore of what we do and don't know, what we can or can't ask or understand. Osborn has an alchemist's gift.

  — Naomi Shihab Nye, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets

• Carolyn Osborn's Uncertain Ground is a gripping evocation of the island of Galveston -- its pirate-haunted, never-quite-domesticated habits threading through its history, its elegance, and its façade of middle-class culture. The book is an equally successful resurrection of the young of the post-WWII decade, recreating the vulnerable, "uncertain" emotional wilderness of that era. Once in Osborn's grip, her characters dont allow you to escape.

  — Rosa Shand, author of The Gravity of Sunlight

• Uncertain Ground is tight, touching, and funny -- a wonderful cast of characters matching wits and sorrows in a special time and place.

  — Jan Reid, author of The Hammer Comes Down (with Lou Dubose) and The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock

• Uncertain Ground is an insightful probing into young adult minds. Set against the background of the not always calm Gulf of Mexico, the novel's lilting rhythms carry the reader from one adventure to another.

  — Annette Sanford, author of Crossing Shattuck Bridge and Lasting Attachments

Reviews

• "Osborn poignantly captures a particular time and place with subtle humor and rich use of idiosyncratic detail."

  BOOKLISTMay 2010

  In the summer of 1953, college student Celia Henderson escapes the stifling heat of her Central Texas hometown for the Gulf breezes of Galveston, where she is charged with keeping tabs on her hard-partying cousin Emmett. That proves a difficult task since Galveston is known to be Texas' Sin City, and Emmett makes regular visits to the red-light district, casino, and various and sundry bars. With its risqué air and tolerance of human vice, Galveston proves to be a confusing place for Celia, who, enmeshed in an unhappy romance with a law student, is well aware that women pay a higher price for sexual freedom than men do. She wants more from life than a shotgun wedding and a house full of children. Emmett and Celia fall in with a group of rich young people and also meet Louis Platon, a Mexican American artist, rumored to be gay, who indirectly teaches Celia much about accepting the uncertainties of life. Osborn poignantly captures a particular time and place with subtle humor and rich use of idiosyncratic detail.

  
  — Joanne Wilkinson

• ... a nostalgic romance that entertains and never gives in to melancholy.

  Dallas Morning NewsJune 20, 2010

  Special to the [Dallas Morning News]

  Reviewed by CLAY REYNOLDS

  Although Carolyn Osborn, past president of the Texas Institute of Letters and winner of the group's Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement, has long been a visible force in Texas writing, it may surprise many readers that this is her premiere novel.

  Better known for her award-winning short stories, Osborn's first long fiction details the bittersweet adventures of a college student during her visit to Galveston Island in the summer of 1953. The story flows like a gulf breeze and offers a sometimes intoxicating mixture of nostalgia and, possibly, autobiography.

  Celia Henderson, an upper-middle-class small-town girl, joins her rake and rambling first cousin, Emmett, on a summer vacation from their drought-stricken ranchland homes in Central Texas. Celia narrates a series of tender, girlish adventures in what is arguably Texas' most exotic setting. As the summer progresses, she meanders about the island, wading in the surf and strolling the relatively new seawall, making friends and examining the nature of life--growing up, in sum.

  There are, as most Texans know, many Galvestons, mostly defined by devastating storms and their aftermath, or by wars. Osborn's setting is post-World War II Galveston, that watershed, pre-modern-development-period when the island was still a lazy tourist getaway offering a bit of benign vice and a generous amount of sun and sand.

  Landmarks appear throughout, most especially the Galvez Hotel. Gaido's Restaurant, LaFitte's Garden, the old downtown financial district, the historic churches, and venerable and apparently hurricane-impervious Victorian homes provide the backdrop. There are snatches of popular music and references to fashion that recall a more innocent and more relaxed society. Darker hints of racism and the Cold War do not much detract from the novel's sweetness.

  The Galveston that Celia visits is dominated by a singular family with (alleged) connections to organized crime; it was, compared with any other city in Texas, wide open. Gambling, prostitution and open saloons operated freely on the island, especially along the infamous Post Office Street. This is a stimulating world for an emotionally confused young woman who worries initially about her sometime-boyfriend in Colorado and also about the unwelcome sexual advances of her handsome but irresponsible cousin. Her main anchor in the bewildering storm of urges is a local artist, Luis, whose Mexican-American lineage and rumored homosexuality appeal to Celia's taste for the unusual.

  There are no hurricane-force plot twists. Events unfold with the rhythmic undulation of a rising tide, but the novel builds to no genuine climax, no moment of truth. Instead, Celia's innocence is eroded by the ebb and flow of circumstance. She gradually gathers the maturity and wisdom she needs to enter a complacent and conservative adult life.

  One problem is that Celia is often a bit smug. She comes off as nearly too perfect, too practical and entirely too sensible to allow herself any real adventure. Clinging to her sense of values, she passes through the summer squalls high and dry. She's made no mistakes, gathered no regrets; but she's also taken no chances, felt no passion, no desire. As a result, she emerges from the experience self-satisfied and a bit judgmental.

  Osborn's characterizations, particularly of the older folks already fading into history, are endearing, just as her portrait of emerging young adults, more worldly and, perhaps, more cynical, is sharp with occasional irony.

  Celia belongs to the quiet generation, too young for war, too old for revolution, destined to settle and be bland. Osborn captures this transition in culture just as she anticipates the evolutions that are beginning to take place on Galveston and blends them together in a nostalgic romance that entertains and never gives in to melancholy.

  ____________
  Novelist Clay Reynolds is professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas.

• Sanctity of selfhood, sexuality and race confront woman

  San Antonio Express-NewsJune 20, 2010

  Review by Joe O'Connell. Special to the [San Antonio Express-News Review]

  Carolyn Osborn may be the most experienced first-time novelist in Texas. Consider her three celebrated short-story collections, O. Henry Award win, PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and former presidency of the Texas Institute of Letters. Oh, and the Texas Book Festival? Her idea.

  "I'm delighted," she said with a wide grin about the publication of her novel Uncertain Ground, which tells of a 20-year-old Celia Henderson finding her voice in 1953 Galveston.

  "The 1950s had a certain innocence," she said. "People wanted that after World War II. But she doesn't fit the '50s mold."

  Osborn wrote the novel's first draft in the 1960s and rewrote it again and again over the years until San Antonio's Wings Press decided it was time for the novel to see print.

  She sees the book not so much as a coming-of-age novel as about the formation of character. "Character is our nature and finding out what that is," she said. Celia "is very curious. She accepts the world with open arms."

  Perhaps looming just as large as a character is Galveston, a place of gambling, drinking and rule-breaking that is diametrically opposed to the 1950s Texas of liquor hidden in paper sacks and sexuality behind closed doors. The novel exquisitely shows this notion of living in a veiled reality through a scene in Galveston's famed Balinese Room, an exotic nightclub and gambling den built on a pier.

  "She's looking for some sort of truth, but she's getting only fabrication," Osborn said of Celia. "The island itself is constantly shifting. I wanted to use that as the basis for a certain time in a person's life."

  The author draws from her own experience. Like Celia, Osborn shared living space at an aunt and uncle's Galveston home with a wild cowboy cousin. "I use little bits and pieces of people," she said of how real life enters her fiction. "They don't necessarily know themselves."

  Osborn's fans may recall a character named Celia in many of her stories, in particular the award-winning story "My Brother is a Cowboy," which also takes place in Galveston and includes a cowboy brother named Kenyon who also reappears in the novel. Celia is a journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin. Osborn graduated from UT with a journalism degree in 1955 and went on to newspaper jobs. She returned to UT in the 1960s to study creative writing with Américo Parédes and quickly began publishing short stories.

  If Celia is Osborn's alter ego, she also represents women demanding a larger place in the world, something Osborn poetically refers to as the "sanctity of selfhood."

  "She is determined not to have to marry," Osborn said. "She will suffer a great deal for this, but she just will not do it. She doesn't want her life to be formed by that one event."

  The novel also examines the larger themes of sexuality and race as Celia becomes infatuated with Luis, an artist who is half Mexican and is rumored to be homosexual. Celia's cousin Emmett looks down on Luis, taking on the prejudices of the wealthy landowners and ranchers of the era.

  "Celia is from somewhere else as I am," said Osborn, who was born in Tennessee but moved to Texas at 12. "People who are Mexican to her are merely exotic."

  Emmett's attitudes can be seen as of the J. Frank Dobie school, Osborn said, adding that she believes the naturalist writer's mind became more open later in life.

  Osborn is working these days with Friends of Paisano on fundraising to renovate Dobie's former Paisano Ranch outside of Austin, which is home to two Texas writers a year who receive fellowships from the Texas Institute of Letters.

  In 1995, Osborn attended the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville and approached friend Mary Margaret Farabee about starting a Texas Book Festival with the help of a very hands-on Laura Bush.

  "This will be its 15th year," Osborn said. "I hope I'll get to read."

• ... more to life than babies and church and cattle

  Galveston County Daily NewsMay 13, 2010

  Review by Poom Sunhachawi-Taylor. Special to the [Galveston County Daily News]

  The Rosenberg Library is hosting its first post-Hurricane Ike book signing on Friday from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.

  Texas author Carolyn Osborn will be reading from and signing her latest book, Uncertain Ground.

  The novel is set in the pre-reform era of 1950s Galveston. Many of the novel's themes are a timely reflection of Galveston's state of flux since Hurricane Ike.

  The Rosenberg Library invites readers to stop by for light refreshments and a reunion with the island's past before heading over to The Galveston County Daily News building for a signing of Infinite Monster: Courage, Hope and Resurrection in the Face of One of America's Largest Hurricanes, a new book chronicling the devastation and rebuilding after Hurricane Ike, by The Daily News reporter Rhiannon Meyers and former reporter Leigh Jones. The signing is from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

  The serendipity of two book signings on the same day is a nod to the tenacious spirit of the island and the creativity of the residents and visitors who shape it.

  Osborn's Uncertain Ground captures a moment in time just before Galveston must bow to the inevitable and enter the modern era.

  Set in 1953, the story is a snapshot of one month in the life of Celia Henderson, a small town Texas girl who has seen just enough of the world to know that there is more to life than babies and church and cattle.

  The novel offers a glimpse of Galveston's long history of struggle against the wilder elements, both human and meteorological. Uncertain Ground also tackles the complex cultural collisions that define the island's character.

  It is a place where the Old South meets the Old West, where poverty and wealth exist side by side, and races mix more freely than elsewhere.

  In the 1950s, Galveston was Texas' own Sin City, a hive of hustlers and gamblers, home to the largest red light district in the state.

  Events and characters in the novel pit old racial and anti-homosexual prejudices against the dawning of a more tolerant age.

  On the uncertain ground of a fragile barrier island--an island inhabited by the ghosts of pirates and the echoes of human tragedy and triumph--Osborn portrays balance as a possibility in an unpredictable world.

  It is no coincidence that Ms. Osborn chose to set her first novel in Galveston. Originally from Nashville, Tenn., Ms. Osborn moved to Texas when she was 12. As a young woman in the 1950s, she frequently visited an aunt and uncle who lived in Galveston. Eventually, she brought her own family to the island, renting a beach house or going on special tours with friends.

  The author believes Galveston is "a wonderful city with a colorful history, the sort of place attractive to writers and to many other people whether they live in Galveston or not."

  Osborn, best known for her short stories and essays, has also been a newspaper reporter, writer for radio and an English teacher at the University of Texas at Austin.

  Now residing in Austin, the award-winning author is a past president of the Texas Institute of Letters and was one of the founders of the Texas Book Festival.

  On writing about Galveston, Ms. Osborn explains: "It's amazing how many people I know who live inland yet have some connection to the island; they lived there, have relatives in Galveston, or went to med school there. Like me, they bonded with the place."

  For information about Carolyn Osborn and Uncertain Ground, visit her website, http://carolynosborn.com.

  _____________