The Rope Walk: A Novel

Author: Brown, Carrie

Color: Black

Edition: Reprint

Number Of Pages: 321

Details:

In The Rope Walk, Carrie Brown crafts a luminous story of a young girl's coming of age during a crucial summer in New England. On her tenth birthday Alice meets two visitors to her quiet town: Theo, the African American grandson of her father's best friend, and Kenneth, an artist who has come home to convalesce. Theo forms an instant bond with Alice that will indelibly change them both. The pair in turn befriend Kenneth, and decide to build a “rope walk” through the woods for him, allowing to make his way through the outdoor world he has always loved. But their good intentions lead to surprising consequences, and Alice soon learns how different the world of children and adults really are.

Reviews:

“Beautifully written. . . . Captures the dignity and grace of a young woman coming into knowledge of herself and the world.”

— Chicago Tribune

“Gentle, lyrical. . . . Brown captures Alice's visceral response to the physical world.”

— The Washington Post Book World

“Reading this novel is a serious pleasure.”

— New Orleans Times-Picayune

About the Author:

Carrie Brown is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories. She has won many awards for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her most recent novel, Confinement, won the Library of Virginia Book Award. She lives in Virginia with her husband, the novelist John Gregory Brown, and their three children. She teaches at Sweet Briar College. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One It was going to be a beautiful day. Alice climbed onto her bedroom windowsill and sat down, wrapping her arms around her legs. Early morning mist hovered in mysterious levels over the lawn below. In the tree branches that inclined near her window, the low sun ignited little white signal fires that flashed at Alice from the velvety spaces between the leaves. It was dark still beneath the ragged hems of the firs at the side of the house, and a cool, musty smell rose from under the old rhododendron bushes, but across the front lawn, downy stripes of sunlight began to unfurl between the long shadows of the trees. Beyond the lawn, and then farther out beyond the low border of the stone wall, fields revealed in the growing light raced away to the wooded horizon. On her windowsill, Alice waited, watching. The full energy of the day, like a parade assembling its drums and cymbals and marching players, lay just out of sight, gathering strength at the edge of the world. Any moment now, the day’s brimming cup would spill over the far treetops and flood the hour with light. Today, the twenty-ninth day of May, was Alice’s tenth birthday. When she was younger, her brothers had told her that the annual Memorial Day parade in Grange, the creeping procession of fire engines and floats and flag bearers that Alice watched with shining eyes from atop her father’s shoulders, was held in celebration of her birthday, as if she were a princess whose subjects collected for her pleasure. Now she could not remember what it had felt like to believe this fiction, though she was assured she had believed it. She could only remember the uncomfortable dawning of her doubt: the gravity of the white-haired soldiers formed into a trembling V whose size diminished each year; her correct linking of the word memorial with the word memory—this, she puzzled, was not language for a birthday celebration; and her adding up of the other signs, too. No one saluted her as they went past. No one came to one knee before her. No one said happy birthday. She could not remember what it had felt like to believe in Santa Claus, either. That faith, too, had slipped away from her with casually troubling ease. Like discovering a hole in her pocket through which a precious trinket had dropped and been lost, she could not pinpoint when the miracle had left her. ...

EAN: 9780307278098

Release Date: 06-05-2008

Languages: English

Item Note: Great shape- pages are unmarked and sharp.Has a remainder mark. Paperback Used - Like New Ships fast! 2008Reprint

Item Condition: UsedLikeNew

Binding: Paperback