Rose Gray
Ebook
Overview
Thirteen-year-old Rose Gray’s fervent prayers for peace during the bombing raids have been answered, but no one around her in 1947 England is physically or spiritually free of the aftereffects of war. Living on a government-run tenant farm, Rose struggles with her father’s increasingly violent moods, her mother’s past (including the appearance of a stranger returning from war), and a school headmistress bordering on madness. Rose’s story is about how, with the help of her religious grandmother, her best friend Annie, and the natural forces of adolescence, she makes small bids for freedom in the midst of circumstances beyond her control.
“Rose Gray puts you in a tension: you want to read
quickly to discover how the story will unfold, but you also want to
slow down to savor sentences and paragraphs. Tansy Chapman has an
ability to create scenes, not by an overabundance of description
but by an exact detail in the perfect place. And it’s clear she
knows her characters and their world so deeply because she knows us
deeply, knows what it means to be a flawed human held in the
redemptive (if often painful) bonds of family and friendship. This
is a work of generous wisdom, a gift to be cherished.”
—Donald McCullough, author of The Whole Picture
“Those who grew up in the aftermath of World War II in England’s
North Country will find Rose’s story ringing true, and a wide range
of readers who will accompany her on her journey will reap rewards
that only good novels can give us, not least the challenge to
revisit our own struggles towards self-understanding and emotional
truth.”
—Martin L. Smith, Episcopal priest and author, Washington, DC
“It is easy to overlook—or forget—what incisive powers of
observation come with being a teenager, but Tansy Chapman offers a
coming-of-age story about an ‘old soul’ in the making. Her
heroine’s gifts of curiosity, compassion, and forgiveness
materialize and deepen, page after page, even though the world she
inhabits has turned itself upside down. Rose Gray is a
beautifully rendered tale about the emergence of a genuine ‘self’
that refuses to be interrupted by dreams deferred.”
—Lisa McElaney, counseling psychologist, Newton,
Massachusetts
“Rose Gray is a character rendered with such precision and clarity,
it is so easy to fall in love with her. The reader becomes her,
facing life on a government farm in post-World War II England; we
risk friendship and first feelings of love, we learn to navigate
her father’s mercurial moods and her mother’s veiled past. We learn
that war makes a mark on us all, and we come to understand that
finding our own path, while not easy, is possible.”
—Charlotte Gullick, Chair of the Creative Writing Department,
Austin Community College, author of By Way of
Water
- Title: Rose Gray
- Author: Tansy Chapman
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781725265219, 9781725265141, 9781725265318, 1725265214, 1725265141, 1725265311
- Resource ID: LLS:9781725265219
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-29T20:22:04Z
Tansy Chapman is a retired Episcopal priest and spiritual
director, mother, and grandmother. She was born and educated in
England; moved to Boston, where she lived for many years; and now
lives in beautiful Mendocino, California.