Rosebloom - Book (pdf)

Rose – a precocious young girl of fifteen – runs away from home to avoid going to high school and what she sees is a certain path to marriage and motherhood. What she is seeking is adventure. What she ends up finding is much more. She finds her adventure in the many towns and many people she meets working on river boats on the Mississippi, going to a prep school in St. Louis while living with a black family in the Ville, and working in a bordello in New Orleans (not as a call girl- she is Catholic girl from the Midwest, after all). What she doesn’t anticipate are the close relationships she develops with many of the women she encounters. She also discovers the harshness of the world away from family and friends. All these circumstances and more grow Rose in ways she could never have predicted. Ultimately, she realizes what is most important to her. Rosebloom takes place in the late 1930’s, so Rose is buffeted by the turbulence of the great depression and the coming wave of World War II. She gets herself into circumstances through her naiveté and also just by chance that test her forbearance and teach her not only about herself but about the world of others that she would have never known if she hadn’t left her small farm in south west Wisconsin.