osprey_archer | 100 Books, #24: Becoming Rosemary

Sometimes Rosemary would be alone in the house, and she would walk by the table to see that one of the books had been pulled away from the others and opened. Slowly, very slowly, the pages would turn, as if blown by a breath from far away...

Sometimes, when Rosemary saw those pages turning, she would run into the forest so that she cold find Con and sit and listen. Sometimes she would stand still, close her eyes, and think hard, trying to warn Con that their father was soon coming home. If he knew, he would forbid this kind of reading.

Frances M. Wood's Becoming Rosemary is one of those books that slipped through the cracks in the book market. It's historical fiction with a hint of magic, like Rosemary's older sister Con's ability to read books from afar. I adore it; but I don't believe I've met anyone else who has read it.

It's set in 1790, but far away from the struggles of the new American government: the book is rooted in Rosemary's daily life, picking mushrooms, striking up a friendship with her new neighbor Mrs. DiAngeli, searching for ginseng to sell for sugar. Brown sugar, of course; only the Squire can afford white.

The action drifts through the farming hamlet where Rosemary lives, among neighbors swiftly but memorably sketched. The cast is large enough that it feels like a real place, but not so large that one ever gets confused about who's who.

They are, by and large, good people; but not so good that they would be anything but frightened by Con's powers, and so Con spends most of her time in the forest, which is Rosemary's second home. The nature descriptions are lovely, with just enough detail to seem vivid but not so much as to ever become obtrusive.

Rosemary felt like laughing herself as she ran home - even though it was now very late. The roadside chicory blossoms were closed up tight. All the birdcalls were evening calls: the liquid warble of the wood thrust, the repeated command from the towhee that Rosemary go home and drink her tea-ea-ea.

And there's a third world that the book dips in and out of: the world of art, of the old, old copy of Shakespeare that Con reads (and which inspires Rosemary to imagine herself as Puck, a mischievous spirit who shows her other sister the worthlessness of a suitor), and the carvings that Rosemary's neighbor and new friend Mrs. DiAngeli makes. Beautiful carvings, so real, so lifelike -

Too lifelike, maybe. " 'A devil's plaything, that's my opinion," Mrs. Bathsheba sniffed"; and this is the beginning of the end of Rosemary's carefree childhood in a seemingly friendly world - a world that, eerily, uncertainly, has begun to turn on the DiAngelis. The DiAngelis who are Catholic; Mrs. DiAngeli who carves too well, Mr. DiAngeli who has fits ever since a falling tree struck him on the head.

Rosemary has always known that powers like Con's (or her mother's; I like Rosemary's mother Althea a lot) were not to be spoken of, but it is only now that she begins to feel the danger they can bring down on those who have them.

"So I take it out," said Mrs. DiAngeli, "now and again. And I feel it with my fingers, and I hold it, and I look at it, and I think about what my many-great-grandmother was trying to say. And what she did say. And then I realize that the world is really much bigger than what I know."