Five Roses
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
2017 Evergreen Award, Forest of Reading — Nominated
A sister. A baby. A man who watches from the trees.
Fara and her husband buy a house with a disturbing history that reawakens memories of her own family tragedy. Maddy still lives in the house, once a hippie commune, where her daughter was kidnapped twenty-seven years ago. Rose grew up isolated with her mother in the backwoods north of Montreal. Now in the city, she questions the silence and deception that shaped her upbringing.
Fara, Maddy, and Rose meet in Montreal’s historic Pointe St-Charles, a rundown neighbourhood on the cusp of gentrification. Against a backdrop of abandonment, loss, and revitalization, the women must confront troubling secrets in order to rebuild their lives.
Zorn deftly interweaves the rich yet fragile lives of three very different people into a story of strength and friendship.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Alice Zorn’s impressive and powerful novel follows three strong, resilient women in Montreal. 27-year-old Rose struggles to adjust to city life after leaving behind her isolated home in the woods. Her challenges crisscross with those of Maddy—a birth mother she doesn't know exists—and also her neighbour Fara’s pain surrounding a relative’s suicide. We were struck by Zorn’s ability to capture the rhythms of Montreal’s Pointe St.-Charles neighbourhood and to tell her heroine’s sad stories with grounded, compassionate realness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zorn's second novel (Arrhythmia) wavers between being a thriller and literary fiction and so does not succeed at being either. Fara is a middle-class young woman looking to purchase her first home with her husband. Rose is all alone in Montreal after moving to the city from the secluded cabin in the woods where she was raised. Maddy makes do by renting a couple of rooms out in the little house she owns. The three come together in the gritty but gentrifying Montreal neighborhood of Pointe St-Charles. Fara and her husband, Fr d ric, move in next door to Maddy. All three women are haunted by similar ghosts: Fara by the suicide of her sister; Maddy by the loss of her infant daughter, who was kidnapped 27 years earlier and never returned; and Rose by the death of her mother. The interwoven narratives that Zorn attempts don't quite work, because she does not develop her characters or their motivations deeply enough to carry readers with her into the intersections of their lives or to make the plot revelations feel like bombshells.
