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.
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.
“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
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