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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.

  _____________
  

• In clean, quiet and elegant prose, Osborn delves deeply

  Austin American StatesmanOct. 8, 2010

  Special to the [The Austin American-Statesman]

  Reviewed by Joe O'Connell

  Galveston has always had a certain wind-battered wildness. Once a major U.S. port, the island city was rebuilt after a devastating storm in 1900 and has been rebuilding and shape-shifting since. In the 1953 setting of Carolyn Osborn's "Uncertain Ground," Galveston is a place where races mix, alcohol flows freely and sexuality bubbles slowly to the surface.

  Enter 20-year-old Celia Henderson, who is sent from her small Central Texas hometown to spend a chunk of the summer with her aunt and uncle in Galveston and finds herself sharing a room with her hard-drinking, flirtatious cowboy cousin Emmett. In the days ahead, Galveston opens her eyes to a larger post-World War II world where women are just beginning to claim a larger role amid a practiced innocence.

  "We've always had a duke's mixture here on the island \u2026 Jews, Mexicans, Irish, Scotch, Negroes, Italians, Germans," Celia's aunt tells her early in the story, as Celia develops a crush on Luis, a half-Mexican artist whose possible homosexuality intrigues her as much as his ethnicity. Emmett, who represents the closed-minded Western ethos of the wealthy landowners and ranchers of the era, looks on with disapproval and anger.

  Osborn, who lives in Austin, is known as one of Texas' finest short story writers, with three published story collections, an O. Henry award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and the former presidency of the Texas Institute of Letters under her belt. Oh, and she can be credited with the original idea for the Texas Book Festival as well after attending the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville and passing this notion on to her friend Mary Margaret Farabee. But this is Osborn's first published novel. She wrote the original draft in the 1960s, and painstakingly revised and rewrote it over the years.

  In the book, she revisits the setting of her much-anthologized short story "My Brother Is a Cowboy," which tells of a similar character named Celia (a character by that name also appears in other Osborn stories) who finds herself in a delightfully naughty Galveston only to be yanked out of it by her disapproving cowboy brother.

  The novel's Celia is juggling her growing sense of independence and her feelings about her law school-entrenched boyfriend, Tony, who offers Celia the era's traditional route of marriage and motherhood. Amid it all she must determine what is real to her and what is as fabricated as what she sees in Galveston's famous Balinese Room, an exotic and shady South Seas-themed nightclub and gambling den built on a pier to keep law enforcement at an arm's length. "Why, I wondered, were restaurants always pretending to be some place else? Why couldn't this one simply be in Galveston?" Celia wonders.

  Celia says of Tony, "Competition is what interested him," and she admits that he is an enigma to her: "Any man would, for minutes, become completely alone, completely themselves. So could any woman; men only seemed further away. Watching others, I would notice my own loneliness. It came to me then that we all lived in small spaces, little territories which others occasionally crossed."

  Galveston offers Celia a chance to connect, to look at herself through the mirror of those so different  the children of society that her mother forces upon her and Emmett, and the exotic Jamaican drummer Tom-Tom, whom she encounters on the beach. But she finds the truest connection with the artist Luis, who is described as "part of a scene yet isolated within it while sketching some seemingly insignificant element."

  In clean, quiet and elegant prose, Osborn delves deeply into the mind of a confused 20-year-old who is seeking some deeper meaning and connection in this world of isolation and artifice. In the background the waves rumble and roar. "Galveston holds on and lets go, adapts and survives," Celia says. In this poetic novel, the author urges us to do the same.

  Joe O'Connell is the author of 'Evacuation Plan,' a novel in stories. He blogs at joeoconnell.com.

• Stephanie Barko's Texas Writers Month Author Interview with Carolyn Osborn

  Stephanie Barko's Book BlogMay 2011

  From Stephanie Barko's [Book Blog]

  Q. Are you a native Texan or did you get here as soon as you could?

  A. I was born in Nashville, TN., which explains the southern accent. In 1946, when I was twelve, my father married a wonderful woman from Gatesville, a small town in central Texas. In effect he married himself, my brother, and me into Texas.

  Q. How did you end up writing historical fiction?

  A. I had a degree in journalism and worked on newspapers long enough to discover I was more interested in people's interior lives, especially their motivations, than I was in the everyday news. Most of the things I was curious about couldn't be printed in a daily newspaper, so I went back to the University of Texas at Austin and got an M.A. in Creative Writing. Since then I've had over sixty short stories and personal essays published.

  Q. What book marketing activities made you a bestselling author?

  A. I'm not a bestselling author, however I have no shame about inviting people to signings, (if you want 100 to show up, send 300 invitations) or paying for a web page. I'm happy to do readings, to appear at book clubs, to answer emails, and to write thank you notes to appreciative readers. My publisher, Bryce Milligan at Wings Press, asked me to do a reading for the Huffington Post when his press was being featured. Lacking the essential equipment, I got my computer guru to film me and make a recording. This worked out well.

  Q. Tell us about your latest release. Is it set in Texas?

  A. Uncertain Ground is set in Galveston in 1953 during the good old-bad old days which serve as a background for the lead characters who at age 20 are trying to begin their adult lives, to decide for instance, what work to do, who they can love, where they need to go, how to deal with uncertainty. As Galveston itself is built on uncertain ground, it's the perfect background for these kinds of questions.

  _________________
  Stephanie Barko, Literary Publicist is a boutique book marketing service for publishers and authors. Clients include both award-winning and debut authors of nonfiction and historical fiction.

• Best 'Top 40' or so for summer reading

  Springfield Township LibraryOn a return visit to GJune 2011

  On a return visit to Galveston Island, Celia recalls the summer month in 1953 that she and her cousin Emmett, then both 20 years old, spent there living with Aunt Bertha and Uncle Mowrey. Emmett's parents sent him away from home to break rodeo and romantic ties, and Celia was to keep an eye on him. Galveston, however, offers its own challenges as "sin city." The cousins meet and get together with other college students there but Emmett continues his wild ways. Celia explores and matures as she makes important decisions in her own life as well as observing and commenting on her family members, social norms and mores, and issues of interest to young adults — prejudice, religion, drinking, sexuality, promiscuity, abstinence, and the mysteries of inner conflicts and inconsistencies. Osborn offers a low-key but compelling description of the commonplace and momentous events of the summer that suits both the 1950s and the slower pace of southern summer life. The title is a metaphor for Galveston Island, a vulnerable island set on shifting sandbar, for human relations, for what is known and not knowable, and for what can and cannot be asked. Highly recommended for High School and College students.