"She died within seconds of falling. She could see the shadows that went with the echoes of screams from up above, but the patterns of light and the fading sounds were nothing more than that. There was not time to think about them, to name them or to say, 'There's lovely', but that is how she felt in those last moments of her life."
Rosie's Umbrella is about love and loss, forgetting and remembering, losing one's self and becoming someone you never knew or imagined being.
We meet 14-year-old Rosie Llywelyn in Boston in 1995 at the moment her life is changed forever by a tragedy that occurred in a coalmining village in Wales in 1955.
From the very first page the reader experiences the emotional turmoil Rosie feels as she tries to find out what has happened to her Aunt Sarah and why her parents won't tell her why they have had Sarah committed to a psychiatric unit in a nearby hospital.
As Taylor engages the reader in Rosie's tragic family story of guilt and forgiveness, she falls into her own family history, and the reader falls with her - as she exposes the cruelty of governments, the wounds of being lumpen, the exploitation of poor families and children, and the trauma of the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of miners and their families from the Welsh coal mining valleys in the first half of the twentieth century.
As Rosie struggles to find her own truth with the support of her teacher and friends in school, she realizes another family tragedy is about to happen. Falling faster now through the pages, Taylor makes sure readers stay on the page with Rosie and her friends through their political awakening to the devastation that power and privilege has on poor people, and to their own vision for the future. Until, filled with love, laughter, and the will to survive, they are ready for the struggle that they know lies ahead.
Praise for Rosie's Umbrella
A novel with a keen understanding of the complexity of family secrets and the tensions between loving family members." - Kirkus Review
Rosie's Umbrella is a gripping, page-turning, wild ride, fueled by great passion, deep humanity, and an urgent call for justice." - James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Presidential Professor, Arizona State University
Rosie's Umbrella is a moving meditation as well as a novel, one that crosses continents and time in order to explore the ways in which the ghost of things past, dramatic and disturbing, can go on affecting lives into the future. I read it in a single sweep, and recommend you do the same." - Geoff Ward, Principal of Homerton College, Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Cambridge.
"What an amazing adventure. To put it mildly, it is a page-turner. If you are searching for a story that will capture all the members of your book club this is it! - Dorothy Watson, Professor Emeritus of Education, University of Missouri
