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Rosie's Umbrella

Name: Rosie's Umbrella
Author: Denny Taylor
ISBN: 978-1942146063

by Denny Taylor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 12, 2015

A novel with a keen understanding of the complexity of family secrets and the tensions between loving family members.

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Taylor’s (Save Our Children, Save Our School, Pearson Broke the Golden Rule, 2014, etc.) debut novel charts the course of a family torn apart by mental illness and revelations about the past.

One morning, when teenage Rosie’s Aunt Sarah returns home from her job as a nurse, it’s clear that she isn’t feeling well. It’s not a typical cold, however; it turns out that she’s had a mental breakdown after getting stuck in an elevator with a patient. Against Rosie’s objections, her parents decide to commit Sarah to an institution to get her the help she needs. As Sarah gradually recovers, she and Rosie correspond via email. Sarah begins to reveal things about Rosie’s family, including their Welsh ancestry. Sarah eventually writes a story called “Rosie’s Umbrella” that refers not to her niece but to a much older relative with the same name. Rosie’s curiosity soon prompts her to research her family history, and she turns up information that’s both profound and unsettling. Part historical tour, part ancestral hunt, and part coming-of-age tale, this novel is an unusual hybrid of teenage angst and genealogical research. The story, told mainly from Rosie’s perspective, attempts to view the wildness of adolescent emotion through a rather mature, grounded, and rational lens: “Emotionally she knew what her mind did not, beyond logic, beyond reason, as if somehow deep inside she felt what Sarah knew.” Taylor uses the first few chapters to thrust readers into events that will later become central to the narrative, although their jarring presentation may be disorienting and puzzling. This quality gradually eases, though, as the novel adopts a more linear structure. The book’s depiction of the pain of buried family history and strained family relationships is poignant and provides its emotional throughline. That said, the author’s use of emails and her choice to increase the font size on the first line of each chapter are stylistically clunky. Overall, though, this is a good read for adolescents and genealogy buffs alike.

A novel with a keen understanding of the complexity of family secrets and the tensions between loving family members.

Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2015

ISBN: 978-1942146063

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Garn Press

Review Posted Online: June 23, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BOYS OF ALABAMA

A NOVEL

by Genevieve Hudson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 2020

A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

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A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.

Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.

A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

Pub Date: May 19, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION

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FAMILY TREE

by Susan Wiggs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.

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After a year in a coma, Annie Rush wakes up to a world without her husband, the TV she developed, and a wealth of memories that put her life into context, but as her body and mind heal, she puts her faith in second chances.

As a successful cooking-show producer who’s married to the gorgeous star, Annie knows she’s lucky, so she overlooks the occasional arguments and her husband’s penchant for eclipsing her. She’s especially excited the day she finds out she’s pregnant and, ignoring her typical steadfast schedule, rushes to the set to tell him. And discovers him making love to his onscreen assistant. Stunned, Annie leaves, trying to figure out her next move, and is struck on the head by falling on-set machinery. She wakes a year later in her Vermont hometown, as weak as a kitten and suffering from amnesia. As the days pass, however, she finds clues and markers regarding her life, and many of her memories begin to fill in. She remembers Fletcher, the first boy she loved, and how their timing was always off. She wanted to leave her family’s maple farm behind and explore the world—especially once her cooking-themed film school project was discovered and she was enfolded into the LA world of a successful food show. Fletcher intended to follow her, until life created big roadblocks for their relationship that they could never manage to overcome. Now, however, Annie’s husband has divorced her while Fletcher has settled in Switchback, and just as things look like they may finally click for Fletcher and Annie, her pre-accident life comes calling again. Wiggs (Starlight on Willow Lake, 2015, etc.) examines one woman’s journey into losing everything and then winning it all back through rediscovering her passions and being true to herself, tackling a complicated dual storyline with her typical blend of authenticity and sensitivity.

A compelling exploration of self, family, love, and the power of new beginnings.