First, I have to send a big Thank You to Em for this book. She had a contest to win a copy a while back, and I won one. Signed by the author, even. So, you can imagine both my excitement and my hesitation when beginning it.

Excitement because it’s always exciting to win something.

Hesitation because what if I didn’t like it? It’s never fun to win something and then not like it.

I did like it though. Very much. I knew early on, though, that I liked it not for the plot — 15-year-old Rosie is dealing with her grandfather’s impending death, as well has her mother’s affair with a married man — but because of the language. (This is the second book in as many weeks where I was captivated by the writing. Who knows: maybe eventually, I’ll even be able to read — and like — Dickens.) It was a simple book, spare in its writing, but that’s a good thing. I felt like Kephart chose her words with poetic carefulness — every word that was there was there for a reason, and designed to give the reader the most vivid picture possible.

For example (from a randomly selected page):

And then I tilt my own eyes high, to find a slice of sky. That was how I discovered the cluster of balloons — the bobbing silver, white, and pink with the sunbeams trapped inside.

And later:

We did the whole thing again, and my head felt slung against itself. There were three of me in the mirror and four of Max in the room, and he was laughing, shaking his head. “We’re oging to have to do that again,” he said. “Rosie.” As if he had to remind me who I was.

It’s all like that. Very evocative. If the language wasn’t so beautiful, so precise, so picturesque, that I would have lost interest because the plot was kind of lackluster. I enjoyed Rosie’s interactions with her grandfather, but the conflict with her mother over her relationship with a married man felt kind of forced. There was a bit of romance with the next-door-neighbor boy, Nick, but nothing to swoon over. My favorite parts — aside from Kephart’s descriptions of the music of Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jr. — were the the ballroom dance lessons. Perhaps it’s because I was a bit of a ballroom dancer back in college, but I was able to picture what she was describing, able to see the dance studio, able to feel the rhythms. I’m not sure if it would have worked so well for me had I not been a dancer once.

One last quote, for the road:

Annie Pearl in the end brought down the house with any flower that blooms in ruby red, because ruby red is the color of July, which is the color of passion, which is the color of a life being lived. Ruby red is the heart, and ruby red was the color of my borrowed shoes , the color of the dress that Miss Marie had sewn for me. Ruby red bloomed everywhere.