Carrie Brown
Reviews of Rose's Garden
This quiet first
novel, set in a tiny New Hampshire village in the White Mountains, concerns
a small town's varied reactions to the grief of a newly widowed man. Conrad
Morrisey lives for his wife, Rose, and his homing pigeons. When Rose dies after
a prolonged illness, Conrad retreats into a shell of memory and reflection.
Through these myriad reflections, the reader comes to know and like Rose and
to understand why her husband loved her so dearly. During one of the novel's
many significant thunderstorms, Conrad spies an angel in Rose's vegetable garden
and is immediately shaken loose from his emotional inertia. He feels compelled
to share the experience with anyone who will listen, and this changes his relationship
with the world forever in ways he never imagined. Firmly grounded by a strong
sense of place, three-dimensional characters, and poetic writing, Rose's
Garden is a joy to visit. Beautiful, bittersweet, and always moving, it
is highly recommended.
--
Library Journal
[A] magical first
novel....Rose's Garden is both luminous and wise.
--New
York Times Book Review
When Conrad Morrissey's
wife, Rose, dies after 50 years of marriage, it takes an angelic visit to save
him from his grief. That is the familiar premise of Brown's sweet, gentle first
novel, set in the small town of Laurel, N.H. Once the ghost of his dead father-in-law
prompts Conrad to concern himself with the living instead of the dead, he discovers
that Rose's mysterious friend Hero, a slightly retarded girl with whom she shared
a love of gardening, has also been receiving instruction from the dead. "And
what had it been to Hero? He could not guess, except to believe that her world
had always been filled with voices, the spokesmen of recrimination and doubt."
As rain threatens to obliterate Laurel's ancient dam, and the town itself, Conrad
finds new meaning in the memory of his wife and in devotion to the White Mountains
community where they both spent the best years of their lives. A town full of
sympathetic characters, including the widowed neighbor who can only sleep when
every light in the house is on, and the beleaguered editor of the local paper,
round out this sensitive debut.
--Publishers
Weekly
A wise, surprisingly
deft, fablelike first novel celebrating the rejuvenating effects of love. Seventy-five-year-old
Conrad, four months after the death of his beloved wife Rose, finds himself
at loose ends, humbly going through life's routines. Nothing stirs him, not
his beloved flock of passenger pigeons, nor the odd, vivid life of the small
New Hampshire town in which he and Rose lived for many decades—nothing,
that is, until he rushes out one stormy night to tend to his flock, only to
encounter an angel in the garden. Even more astonishing, the angel has the features
of Conrad's long-dead father-in-law, Lemuel. The message he carries is curiously
simple: Rose loves him, and it is time for Conrad to "go home.'' Not to heaven,
but back to his home in this world, back to some sort of involvement with his
neighbors. Conrad, dazzled, sets down the experience in a straightforward letter
to the local newspaper. Its publication inspires a series of confessions by
Conrad's neighbors, a variety of stories about the irruption of mystery and
the sacred into everyday life. Conrad begins to tend Rose's vast, beloved garden
again, finds himself building a tentative yet nourishing friendship with Hero,
a deeply disturbed but profoundly gifted young woman who had been Rose's gardening
protegy and also finds, to his considerable surprise, that he now feels a clear
appetite for life. Having worked as a gilder, covering everything from capitol
domes to church spires to weather vanes in gold, "sealing the plain old world
in shimmering layers,'' he now discovers the extraordinary beauty already present
in the world. And he's given a chance to help save it when a ferocious storm
causes a local dam to crumple, threatening his town and his friends. All of
this would seem an unaffecting melodrama in less talented hands. But Brown nicely
matches a shrewd eye for character with a fresh, unadorned, exact prose style.
A warm, remarkably surefooted debut.
--Kirkus
Excerpt from Rose's
Garden