The Rope Walk: A Novel
by Carrie Brown
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Book Summary Information
Author: Carrie BrownEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN: 0375424636
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Reviews of The Rope Walk: A Novel
Book Review: Big Issues on a Small Canvas
Summary: 5 Stars
This beautifully realized gem of a novel has all of life's big issues writ on a small canvas. Family relationships, love, loss, inter-racial relationships, AIDS,and death are all here, seen through the eyes of an enchanting 10 year old in rural Vermont.I wanted to be part of Alice's family. I did not want this book to end.
If The Rope Walk had been written by Ian McEwan (supposing for a moment he were capable of such restraint), we would be talking Booker Prize. It is amazing that this book has not received wider acclaim.
Summary of The Rope Walk: A Novel
The Rope Walk brings us the dazzling story of a pivotal summer in the life of Alice, a redheaded tomboy and motherless girl who is beloved and protected by her five older brothers and her widower father, a professor of Shakespeare. On Memorial Day, at her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she's known before. Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer. Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce with his middle-aged sister. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and, almost as quickly, find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial Kenneth. When the children begin a daily routine of reading aloud to the artist, who is losing his eyesight, they discover the journals of Lewis and Clark and decide to embark on their own wilderness adventure: they plan and secretly build a "rope walk" through the woods for Kenneth and in the process learn the first of many hard truths about the way adults see the world, no matter that they are often wrong.The great gift of The Rope Walk is its exquisitely poised writing. Alice's narrative is a profound experience of innocence, of perception balanced between childhood and adulthood. The flying spark of new friendship, the first intimation of adult love, the consolation of devotion, which allow Alice and Theo to shed light in the midst of darkness and to find joy in mutual understanding: these glistening threads are drawn together in a timeless story-profound, seductive, wise, and moving, from first to last.
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