Almost-spinster schoolteacher Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell married
Otis Churchill on a Michigan farm in 1857. Her real-life journal
recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six
decades, and the novel explores the truth. We meet Rosette in 1888
as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. In lush detail,
in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both
choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and
sometimes rise from the wreckage. In a style reminiscent of Willa
Cather, in a family saga that recalls the work of Marilynne
Robinson, this novel brings us enduring themes of human life as
Rosette and her friends and family make the most of the American
pioneer life first detailed for most of us by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Each narrator - Rosette, her brother Solomon, her mother Sally, her
husband Otis, and briefly their son DeWitt - offers his or her own
perspective on the events, giving insight into themselves as well
as the other characters. Rosette tells her mother her dreams, and
Sally discerns meaning her daughter does not see. Otis reveals his
solitary and ambitious character, and Solomon is his foil - these
two pursue life and love quite differently. DeWitt speaks in his
own middle age of his western frontier homesteading, combining the
characters of his parents while being at the same time his own man.
The novel closes with an elderly Rosette reflecting on the stream
of the life she envisioned in the journal of her twenties - what
might have been, what was lost, and what might yet be. With
authentic historical detail and modern insight, this novel conveys
hopes and heartaches of our own world in a setting of pioneer
challenges with the weather, great physical effort, and limited
resources, as well as pioneer advantages of fulfilling success in
one's own efforts and a close-knit community of neighbors visiting
one another's farms and supplying one another's needs every day. A
rousing presidential election season, vigil at a neighbor's
deathbed and preparation for burial, family and friends building a
honeymoon sleigh, and community sledding, dances, an apple-paring
bee, and a spell-down at the local school - all of these are
recorded in the twenty months of Rosette's journal. The novel opens
up these experiences for the modern reader, carrying us into
Rosette's world and back into our own hearts. Rosette will linger
with us. *"I would almost call this an epic of the heartland, a
novel that makes the small sacrifices of an anonymous woman equal
to the most celebrated hero of legend." - Joshua Grasso, Department
of English, East Central University *" Rosette is a seamless
narrative...[A]llow yourself time to find the rhythm of the novel's
phrasing. The 1850s were a more formal time, in manners and speech.
Be caught up in Rosette's life as I was. As a student of history, I
waited for the small mistake of fact. I found none. You may use
this novel as a window into pre-Civil War rural Michigan." - Karen
Charbonneau, author of Marble Creek and The Wolf's Sun *"Her use of
language is superb, echoing the phraseology of the time without
sounding stagey, which makes the diary extracts blend seamlessly
with Marsch's own text." - Debbie Young, Commissioning Editor and
UK Ambassador, The Alliance of Independent Authors
General
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