The Rose Thieves
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Rose Thieves gives us the Vanderwald family: flamboyant, hot-tempered Lila, who feels trapped living in a small New England town; her sentimental, eternally optimistic husband, a failed futures-market investor; and their children. An affectionate daughter steals flowers from gardens all over town for her big sister's sixteenth birthday. A tea party for the local minister is turned upside down by a four-year-old's remark. Sheep wander through the kitchen, an enraged mother swan menaces the sisters as their own mother entertains a possible lover, and, after a near-disaster, Lila proclaims "We faced death; death couldn't face us!" Amidst the chaos, Kate, the oldest daughter, practices piano because "Haydn will give
order to everything, if only you play him right."
With wit, natural artistry, and a keen eye for the absurd, Heidi Jon Schmidt effortlessly weaves stories of strange but all-too-real family life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These loosely connected stories, many of which have been previously published, take us inside a family that is by turns beguiling and exasperating. We follow the peregrinations of a couple, who eventually divorce, and their four children as they are beset by economic instability and emotional waywardness. Ma, a volatile, fey beauty, and Pa, a stockbroker whose sentimentality interferes with his professional and personal relationships, remain unscathed in their drafty house in an arcadian New England, as their children grow into awareness of their parents' conflicts and adjust to them. Kate, the eldest, entering adulthood, observes their reckless, attractive demeanor: ``My family loves a crisis, a chance to drop all the tedious ordinary chores and surrender ourselves to emotion.'' Schmidt's first collection is an entertaining coming-of-age chronicle that captures the rueful humor in family ambiguities.
