Rope Walk (Brown)

The Rope Walk
Carrie Brown, 2007
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307278098

Summary
In The Rope Walk, Carrie Brown crafts a luminous story of a young girl's coming of age during a crucial summer in New England.

On her tenth birthday Alice meets two visitors to her quiet town: Theo, the African American grandson of her father's best friend, and Kenneth, an artist who has come home to convalesce. Theo forms an instant bond with Alice that will indelibly change them both. The pair in turn befriend Kenneth, and decide to build a “rope walk” through the woods for him, allowing to make his way through the outdoor world he has always loved.

But their good intentions lead to surprising consequences, and Alice soon learns how different the world of children and adults really are. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
Carrie Brown is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories. She has won many awards for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.

Her previos novel, Confinement, won the Library of Virginia Book Award. She lives in Virginia with her husband, the novelist John Gregory Brown, and their three children. She teaches at Sweet Briar College. (From the publisher.)

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Book Reviews
This coming-of-age novel begins with Alice MacCauley on the morning of her 10th birthday, as she sits on the windowsill of her bedroom, viewing the scene below through the opening of a square made by her fingers—a make-believe camera lens, and a trope that repeats throughout the story.... The tone changes as Brown reveals an older Alice in the wonderful last part of the book, where a new note of seriousness and gravity is deeply felt. We leave Alice decidedly more mature than she was in the opening chapter, which means decidedly less sanguine. It's not that we have to worry for her; we never did, but we're moved by the change. She has, by the end of the book, given up her make-believe camera and is taking pictures with a real one that once belonged to her mother. She's off the windowsill and on her feet.
Elizabeth Strout - Washington Post

Like Brown's first novel, Rose's Garden, her sixth sets themes of tolerance and understanding in a picture-postcard setting. In a Vermont town where a description of the local library racks up a dozen adjectives (including "tall," "bracing," "rippling," "silvery" and "delicious"), children collect butterflies and recite "Hiawatha." When Kenneth Fitzgerald, the artist who sponsored the library's transformation from dreary to spectacular, returns to his childhood home dying of AIDS, he asks 10-year-old Alice MacCauley and her neighbors' manic visiting mixed-race grandson, Thelonious Swann— "a tawny little lion cub"—to come by and read to him in the afternoons. Alice's mother died young; her father teaches Shakespeare and recites it around the house (while her older brothers blow smoke rings), so Alice is primed for literature. All three are drawn into Lewis and Clark's journals as Alice reads them aloud; the explorers' historic journey stands in for Fitzgerald's journey toward death and for Alice and Theo's trip into nascent first love and adulthood. The rope Alice walks isn't very high off the ground, but Brown keeps it taut and stretched across some engaging vistas.
Publishers Weekly

Alice is the only daughter of a widower with four sons. Her mother died when she was very young, and Alice is living a protected and love-cushioned life with her beloved father and her rowdy brothers who flit in and out of the house on school vacations. On her tenth birthday, her family takes in a boy her own age who is the grandson of her father's friend, and whose family is in disarray. The boy, who is African American, is an adventurer and knowledgeable in ways she is not, and together they discover things about themselves and the world they are living in. They also meet Kenneth, the artist brother of one of their neighbors, who is dying of HIV, and they decide to make him a rope walk behind his house so that he can safely take walks in the woods by himself. Their well-meaning act leads to an inevitable end. They are separated and Alice's comfortable relationships are disrupted. She must figure out how to put the pieces together and grow up with an understanding that adults and children can be well meaning, but wrongheaded. The story is beautifully written and the just barely pre-pubescent relationship of the young girl and boy is told in a sweet and innocent way. The New England setting is vividly described. —Nola Theiss
KLIATT

In this latest from Brown (Confinement), ten-year-old Alice MacCauley enjoys an idyllic if motherless childhood in quaint Grange, VT, surrounded by five adoring, much older brothers and gently guided through life by Archie, her professor father. Alice's self-contained curiosity meets its match when Thelonius Swann, also ten, joins their household for the summer while his family struggles with debilitating crises. Alice and Theo have an imagination-rich friendship that extends to Kenneth Fitzgerald, a world-renowned sculptor who has returned home, dying of AIDS. The children spend the summer building a rope walk through the woods near Kenneth's home. Intended as a gift to Kenneth to give him back some of the freedom stolen from him by the ravages of his disease, it is the catalyst for a shattering event. It takes a masterly touch to make believable Alice's maturity and her unfiltered forthrightness when telling her story. Brown's exquisite word paintings of the details of childhood are tone-perfect and utterly irresistible. Highly recommended
Beth E. Andersen - Library Journal

(Adult/High School) Alice MacCauley and her family are celebrating her 10th birthday. As the guests arrive, readers are introduced to neighbors, friends, and family, all of whom have hidden prejudices and anxieties. Theo, the biracial grandson of Alice's father's friends, is supposed to be visiting his grandparents, but by the end of the evening he is sharing Alice's bedroom and will become a fixture in her family for the remainder of the season. Over the course of the summer they share secrets, befriend a dying artist, and learn more about suffering, humanity, and intolerance then any child her age needs to know. Together they try to make sense of the world, particularly of how adults think and why people hate the way they do. One of the lessons Alice learns is that the most heartfelt intentions can produce the most tragic results. Teens looking for an angst-filled novel will find that this one asks many questions about life and relationships without providing any pat answers. —Joanne Ligamari, Rio Linda School District, Sacramento, CA
School Library Journal

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Discussion Questions
1. The Rope Walk is told from the point-of-view of a 10-year-old girl. Why has the author written a literary novel for adults from this viewpoint? Does the novel make you reminisce about your own childhood?

2. Describe the similarities and differences between Alice and Theo. Why are they drawn to each other, and why do they become such good friends?

3. In what ways does the author stress the importance of stories, literature, and art in our daily lives in The Rope Walk? What is the importance of collective family stories, particularly those about Alice's mother? How do stories give meaning to Alice’s experience?

4. How is the landscape—the trees, the river, the garden—crucial to this story? How has the physical environment of this small Vermont town helped form the child that is Alice? Why does Theo adapt so well to Vermont even though he is a city boy?

5. Alice meets Theo and Kenneth on her tenth birthday and through them is confronted with issues of race and AIDS. How does befriending these two influence Alice, and what do they teach her about the larger adult world?

6. Why does Kenneth enter Alice and Theo’s lives so suddenly and prominently? How is he different from the other adults around them? How does the presence of these children affect Kenneth?

7. Why do the children choose to read The Journeys of Lewis and Clark to Kenneth? How does this choice influence the children and the course of the novel?

8. Why do the children decide to build a rope walk for Kenneth? Why and how do they keep it a secret from everyone?

9. Though Alice and Theo are motherless during the course of the novel, how dotheir mothers and memories of their mothers influence their lives? How does the absence of mothers affect both Alice (who has never known her mother) and Theo (who is temporarily removed from his)?

10. Father and daughter annually walk down to the river together—“This was their tradition on her birthday, a tradition begun by Archie for Alice alone [p. 63]." The Rope Walk is filled with family rituals and traditions. How are these important in giving Alice a sense of her world and of her purpose in it?

11. What kind of home environment do Alice’s father and her brothers create for her? How does she, so much younger than everyone else and the only female, fit into the household?

12. In what ways does this novel remind you of the importance of play and the imagination in childhood? Do you think Alice’s father should have reined the children in before the accident happened?

13. Do you agree with Archie that writing about something is the only way to learn it? What do you think of the “letters of apology” that he makes his children write?

14. Pieces of furniture in Alice’s house have names and memories attached to them as if they were members of the family. Describe the connection between the house and the family. Contrast Alice’s house with the Fitzgerald house.

15. Death appears throughout The Rope Walk in various forms—Alice’s dead mother, the dying figures of Theo’s grandmother and Kenneth, the frozen deer. How do the two children approach and accept death? Do they understand it?

16. Alice captures photos with an imaginary camera throughout the novel. Why? What happens when she eventually finds her mother’s old camera?

17. Though there are references to the year 2005 and to various news events, the novel has a sense of timelessness. How does the author achieve this, and what do you think her intention was?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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