Somewhere in what now felt like the distant past there had been a beautiful May morning when she had turned ten years old, and for the first time happiness and sadness, beauty and cruelty had begun to join together inside her, entwining themselves inextricably like the tendrils of a vine up the trunk of a tree.
Carrie Brown, The Rope Walk
Alice, who lives with her widowed father, Archie, and much older brothers, celebrates her 10th birthday as the novel opens. And so begins the most wonderful summer of her life, and yet also the cruelest.
On that day, Theo, a mixed-race boy of about her age, comes to live with her temporarily. His mother is experiencing extreme depression and his grandmother has been hospitalized. Archie agrees to let the boy stay with them for a few weeks. He is like the best birthday gift ever.
Theo turns out to be a creative, game-for-anything child who brings a tool box with him, but very few clothes. The summer days become one adventure after another. "He was the kind of boy she didn't think she would get tired of," Brown writes.
Nearby lives Kenneth, a famous artist in declining health. Alice is asked to read to him each day, and Kenneth chooses The Journals of Lewis and Clark, a book that feeds Theo's thirst for adventure as he listens along with the old man.
As a secret gift for Kenneth, the children decide to build a rope walk through the nearby forest so that the old man will be able to experience nature on his own and find his way back home again. Their naive kindness leads to tragedy.
I don't know if The Journals of Lewis and Clark is a great book for reading out loud, but I'm sure The Rope Walk would be. Many passages in the story are utterly beautiful, and I discovered myself reading them aloud.
Like Lamb in Love, another Carrie Brown novel, The Rope Walk is a gem that deserves a comeback in bookstores.
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