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Gadd & Company Publishers, Inc.
May 2007
On Sale: April 30, 2007
Featuring: Rose
400 pages ISBN: 0977405346 EAN: 9780977405343 Trade Size
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Young Adult
Rose begins to think of her mother as Sarah because the very
word mother makes her cry. She continually asks herself what
her mother would do about breakfast for the family; about
how to take care of her siblings; about her father s
drinking and going off to a hotel almost every evening.
After the unusual accident that killed her mother,
fourteen-year-old Rose Hibbard copes. She is forced to take
on her silently grieving father and her younger brother and
sister. Without a role model of her own, she becomes one for
her eight-year-old sister. She makes breakfast, gets
everyone started for the day, does the washing and ironing
and sewing, and still manages to get to school and do her
own homework. Interspersed with Rose s moments of panic or
despair are warm hours shared with her friends, Alice and
Emily, who listen and help and have fun with her; times
familiar to most American teenagers today. As are the nights
she stares at the moon and wishes on stars, as well as her
developing romance with young Newton Barnes. Just when Rose
thinks her family will find a way to manage without a
mother, her father says she will have to leave school for
good in the spring. Her teacher is her main adult ally.
School is where she is happiest and feels most comfortable,
where life feels almost normal for someone her age. The one
thing that has kept her going, giving her the will to take
care of everyone and stay awake in class is her lifelong
dream of becoming a teacher, and it disappears in a matter
of seconds. Her brother and sister often sneak off to cry at
their mother s grave, and Rose s father, unable to face his
own loss, becomes increasingly gruff and silent. She
overhears a gossipy neighbor saying something about her
father being at the drink. And when she comes home early one
day and discovers her father, his trousers in a heap on the
floor, laughing in her parents bedroom with a half-clothed
woman, she flees to the wooods.
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