The Rose Grower: A Novel - Hardcover

De Kretser, Michelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078670733X ISBN 13: 9780786707331

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Recounting the five calamitous years of the French Revolution, this debut novel begins in 1789 when an American balloonist drops out the sky into the pastoral world of a magistrate and his three daughters. As terror looms, one daughter tends to her rose garden and tries in vein to win the American's affections.

About this title

Review:

14th July 1789, Montsignac, Gascony. The Saint-Pierre family is caring for American artist Stephen Fletcher after he's fallen from his balloon, and landed in a haystack. Jean-Baptiste de Saint- Pierre is a magistrate with three daughters. Claire, the eldest, is beautiful and married (in a way that seems to require little personal involvement) to the odious and malodorous aristo Hubert. Sophie is plain, single, intelligent, good, competent and obsessed with growing roses. And Mathilde is eight and entertainingly precocious: when Stephen remarks on how he adores children because "'They are so ...innocent and yet so perceptive in their apprehension of the world'", Matty dismisses him instantly. " 'Oh no--another Rousseauist,' said the child with unconcealed disappointment. 'I'm not like that at all.' " And then there's Brutus, the dog who "only bites people whose smell he doesn't like."...

But the Saint-Pierres' existences--like those of everyone else in the locality--are about to fracture as the Revolution gathers momentum and the shockwaves from Paris push out into the provinces. The book's epigraph: "Small change, small change"-- Napoleon Bonaparte's comment on surveying the dead on a battlefield--signals this to be a novel of small people caught up in big events. And, indeed, Michelle de Kretser takes us from the co-operative and optimistic start of the Revolution as it manifests in Montsignac, through factionalisation, fanaticism and Terror, denunciations and betrayals, through love and loyalty to a quiet, damaged aftermath, with a vivid cast of surprising heroes, unexpected villains and not-quite-innocent bystanders.

The Rose Grower is a hypnotically engrossing novel that illuminates the biggest of issues with the lightest, most fragrant of touches. --Lisa Gee

Review:

"If Jane Austen had been French, she might well have invented the family Saint-Pierre.... Stylish and uniquely crafted."-- "The Orlando Sentinel "Powerful ... lovely, meticulously researched ... evokes the beginnings of the Terror in crisp, elegant, compassionate prose."-- "The New York Times Book Review "Fascinating ... Sophie's calmness and kindness, her passion for roses, her botanical studies and attempts to create a crimson flower ... are the soul and spine of the book.... De Kretser has exhaustively researched the life of the period, but she wears her knowledge lightly."-- "The Washington Post Book World

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 078670733X
• ISBN 13: 9780786707331
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448