Fowler moves around in time and geography until we discover, in the present of 2012, why Fern was sent away and Rosemary’s role in her expulsion. What actually happened to Fern is the question that haunts Rosemary. After, none.”īut, of course, normal is hardly a word to describe such circumstances. “Those weeks I spent with our grandparents in Indianapolis still serve as the most extreme demarcation in my life, my personal Rubicon. A chatty, outgoing 5-year-old, she comes back to a new house with only three bedrooms, a mother suffering from a breakdown, a father drinking too much, a brother on the lam. Slyly and to great effect, Rosemary starts her story in the middle, in 1996, when she’s 22 and “meandering through my fifth year at the University of California, Davis.” The narration switches back to 1979, during the weeks she was sent to her grandparents in Indianapolis. These events, and others, assemble into a convoluted chronology like scattered puzzle pieces, which, by the end of the novel, all fall into place. The two big turning points in her life - in the lives of the entire Cooke family - are bookended by Fern’s arrival when Rosemary is only a month old and departure when Rosemary is 5. As a child, Rosemary herself is helpless.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |