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SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH ROSIE COLORED GLASSES
Just as opposites attract, they can also cause friction, and no one feels that friction more than Rex and Rosie’s daughter, Willow. Rex is serious and unsentimental and tapes checklists of chores on Willow’s bedroom door. Rosie is sparkling and enchanting and meets Willow in their treehouse in the middle of the night to feast on candy.
After Rex and Rosie’s divorce, Willow finds herself navigating their two different worlds. She is clearly under the spell of her exciting, fun-loving mother. But as Rosie’s behavior becomes more turbulent, the darker underpinnings of her manic love are revealed.
Rex had removed his Rosie colored glasses long ago, but will Willow do the same?
Whimsical, heartbreaking and uplifting, this is a novel about the many ways love can find you. Rosie Colored Glasses triumphs with the most endearing examples of how mothers and fathers and sons and daughters bend for one another.
There was a time in my life when writing this book, telling this story, would not have been possible. It wasn’t that I was waiting on my writing technique to mature or the time to put fingers to keyboard. I was waiting for the combination of curiosity and recklessness and confidence and energy required to explore a little voice inside of me that said, “What really happened back then with Mom?”
The start of that journey into my past was the start of this novel.
The mother I remember growing up with was fabulous. She is nearly identical to the main character, Rosie, that you will read about. She wore bright colours and wacky earrings. She let me skip school and drink coffee. I casually told a close friend about the coffee thing once and she winced. “Really?” she asked, earnestly concerned. “That doesn’t sound like a good idea for a kid.”
It stuck with me. There were other things like the coffee. Cake for dinner. Skipping out on homework to play. Watching South Park together until the sun rose. They seemed fun and refreshing at the time, but looking back on it now, they were also almost certainly irresponsible. Especially because there were also other less fun or refreshing things that came to mind when I thought about my mother. The smell of cigarettes in the bathroom. The stretches of time during which my father told me Mom was “away.” Once, my mother picked me up from school with an eyepatch on. She had injured her eye in a car accident, but it was no big deal because now we could play pirates. Even at six years old, those excuses didn’t sit right with me. Young Willow, the other protagonist of the novel, wrestles with these same feelings.
My mother died in a car accident when I was nine years old. Her death was, of course, a tragedy. I later learned that it was also the outcome of yet another opiate binge.
I have spent a lot of time in my life coping with the loss of my mother. But until I sat down to write this novel, I had not spent a lot of time thinking about what my mother’s death must have been like for my father. What my mother’s life must have been like for my father. What it must have been like for my mother to live the life she lived.
Rosie Coloured Glasses is my imagined look at what happened, from all sides. It is a work of fiction, but still, to me, this novel is told from my perspective, which will forever be that of a little girl trying to understand the thoughts, feelings and choices of her parents.
Thanks for reading it, and I hope you enjoy it.
BRIANNA WOLFSON is part of the writing community in San Francisco and has published some stories online. Rosie Coloured Glasses is her first novel.
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Brianna Wolfson 2018
Brianna Wolfson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9781474058445
To my mad and moonly mama,whom I still think about each day.
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