The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination.

Sarah Jane “Sookie” Poole is the protagonist of The All-Girls Filling Station’s Last Reunion. She is married to Earle Poole Jr., and is mother to four children: Dee Dee, twins Le Le and Ce Ce, and Carter. At the beginning of the novel, she learns that her spitfire mother Lenore Simmons Krackenberry adopted her in Texas in 1945. She spends much of the novel contending with her new identity as the daughter of one of the Jurdabralinski sisters, though she erroneously believes she is Fritzi’s daughter for much of the narrative. When Fritzi reveals that her name only appears on the birth certificate because she is the one who dropped her off at the orphanage, she also tells Sookie that Sophie Marie Jurdabralinski is her real mother. Sophie died in a plane crash shortly before the WASP program ended.

Sookie has felt overshadowed by Lenore for much of her adult life, worried that she’s “never had any real personality traits of [her] own” (102). Learning that Lenore adopted her and never told her makes her question her relationship to her mother and her own sense of self.