Shelby Hearon's 15th novel Ella In Bloom begins on a cloying note, with its eponymous protagonist describing, in rapturous and rococo detail, the rose garden she planted for her mother Agatha: "Such care I took throughout that spring and early summer, steeping myself in the history of Chinas, Teas, Albas, Gallicas, Bourbons, Noisettes… I learned to decipher the tiny notations in the antique-rose catalogues I kept by my bed, signifying scent, hue, hips, remontancy—a lovely, lingering word meaning to flower again, meaning possessed of a second chance to bloom." But a bare two pages later, Hearon reveals the cleverest twist in her mostly straightforward romance: The garden is an elaborate fiction, intended not to gratify a flower-loving mother, but to blunt the ever-present disapproval of a harshly judgmental martinet. In reality, Ella is a young single mother (though she notes that her runaway husband's eventual death granted her the more socially acceptable title of "widow") living in a dilapidated, gardenless house, eking out a narrow living by plant-sitting for the local well-to-do. In her letters home, she's a graceful socialite who lives in decorous splendor, obsessed with the small, calculatedly gracious trivia of growing perfect roses, shopping for the perfect linen suit, and eating perfect food at the country club. But in spite of the elaborate lie, she's still playing second fiddle to her dead sister Terrell, who seemed to successfully live her mother-pleasing fictional life instead of just writing about it. In a predictable but well-crafted series of developments, Ella eventually sees through the cracks in both Terrell's and her mother's façades, then gets her own chance at remontancy when she reunites with Terrell's husband, an impossibly perfect man whose presence was clearly part of Terrell's carefully constructed reality. But Ella In Bloom focuses far less on their blossoming romance than on the deeply frustrating, unpleasant relationship between Ella and her mother. Their encounters, while rigidly polite, are needlessly shrill and harrowing; after Agatha's umpteenth brutal, self-absorbed verbal barb, it's hard to believe anyone could want the approval of such a bigoted, classist, arrogant, tiresome old harridan. Her almost cartoonishly excessive horridness is one of the few weak points of an otherwise charming, assured, quiet novel about how people fit in and get by, mostly by shaping their lives to accommodate audiences both real and imagined.