New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
Rose Addams is hitting her sixties, but these days it feels like they're starting to hit back.
Her daughter, Morgan, has ditched her thesis program and moved back home to Vancouver, while her son Jason's partner has never seen eye to eye with his mother. Her husband Charles has decided to take early retirement from the university to work on his long-gestating book, and his rakish best friend Garnet has a new mistress who is way too young for their social circle. When Rose encounters a young man panhandling outside of her library office though, a chain of events is set in motion whereby Rose will have to confront all the facets of her rapidly-complicating life.
Recalling the work of Caroline Adderson, Krista Foss, and Marie-Renée Lavoie, Margie Taylor's Rose Addams is an insight into the life of a woman who is in the process of beginning her third act, an empathetic and incisive look at the problems of those just exiting middle age while attempting to keep up with a rapidly-changing world.
Editorial Review
Praise for Rose Addams"An intimate look at a woman entering her third act on life's stage. Rose reflects on her role as wife and mother and how she will improvise in a very complicated and unpredictable world."
-Senator Pamela Wallin
"Margie Taylor loves Rose Addams. Loves her despite Rose's blind spots and anxieties. Or because of them. In this compulsively readable novel, Taylor shines a witty and compassionate light on the world of a woman navigating her sixth decade-a daring project, given how little literature has bothered. As Taylor deftly nudges her heroine past personal crises that test her convictions about motherhood, marriage and propriety, she lets Rose (and us readers) glimpse a new, deeper kind of self-knowledge that only comes with age."
-Marguerite Pigeon, author of The Endless Garment and Some Extremely Boring Drives
"Readers will smile to recognize family members, friends, and themselves in this gentle skewering of a middle-class, middle-aged Vancouver woman and her circle. Hints of Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Strout enliven a perspicacious account of friendships, generation gaps, unsuitable attachments, and the indignities of encroaching age. Margie Taylor has created, in Rose Addams, an avatar for women of a certain age who struggle to learn a new generation's perspectives and mores, but when crises arise, are heroically present with their experience and fierce commitment to the vulnerable of society."
-Karen Hofmann, award-winning author of A Brief View from the Coastal Suite and Echolocation
"Margie Taylor writes with great empathy and sharp insight. Readers will root for the characters in this compelling story."
-Lisa Guenther, author of Friendly Fire
"A beautifully crafted work, Rose Addams features vivid characters facing real-world problems in a narrative that reads like a thriller. I had a hard time putting this one down."
-Ken McGoogan, author of Fatal Passage and Lady Franklin's Revenge
"In a style reminiscent of Carol Shields and Bonnie Burnard, Margie Taylor has crafted a warm-hearted tale from the life of Rose Addams. Rose, as her husband Charles points out, is a woman 'compelled to insert herself into every situation.' Not quite a busybody, not quite a fixer (sometimes the opposite), Rose tries her best to be useful and kind and keep up with the times. No easy task when presented with the abrupt appearance of a young man who stayed at their home briefly when he was a child, a daughter in a personal crisis, new and peculiar behaviour from Rose's husband, and various surprise announcements from her long-term friends and their mismatched (according to Rose) romantic partners. Rose's strong character and her knack for jumping to (incorrect) assumptions make for a highly engaging, frequently funny, story that is, ultimately, about the changing nature of all of our relationships as we age."
-Barb Howard, author of Happy Sands and Western Taxidermy
