The Rope Walk brings us the dazzling story of a pivotal summer in the life of Alice, a redheaded tomboy and motherless girl who is beloved and protected by her five older brothers and her widower father, a professor of Shakespeare.

On Memorial Day, at her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she's known before. Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer. Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce with his middle-aged sister. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and, almost as quickly, find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial Kenneth. When the children begin a daily routine of reading aloud to the artist, who is losing his eyesight, they discover the journals of Lewis and Clark and decide to embark on their own wilderness adventure: they plan and secretly build a "rope walk" through the woods for Kenneth and in the process learn the first of many hard truths about the way adults see the world, no matter that they are often wrong.

The great gift of The Rope Walk is its exquisitely poised writing. Alice's narrative is a profound experience of innocence, of perception balanced between childhood and adulthood. The flying spark of new friendship, the first intimation of adult love, the consolation of devotion, which allow Alice and Theo to shed light in the midst of darkness and to find joy in mutual understanding: these glistening threads are drawn together in a timeless story — profound, seductive, wise, and moving, from first to last.

"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 (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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. Alice's mother is dead, but Alice has plenty of family and people who care for her: a father, five older brothers,..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) a Vietnamese woman who cooks and cleans, and others in the small Vermont town where Alice has lived all her young life. Alice's mother died before the girl could remember her, and she appears to accept this loss with surprisingly little trouble; her world is thick with love, and any sense of things being unsafe seems not yet to have penetrated.

This gentle, lyrical book opens outward slowly, taking its time — sometimes too much time. But Carrie Brown, the author of 'Rose's Garden' and 'Confinement,' among others, is good at evoking place, and here she captures young Alice's visceral response to the physical word. Alice uses her made-up camera to sweep over the orchards and lawn and daffodils, and we feel her connection to the land itself; the world is her friend. She makes two new friends, however, and through them she begins to mature. The first is a boy her age, Theo, the grandson of MacCauley family friends who has arrived for the summer. We never see Theo's mother, who remains in New York struggling with depression and a failing marriage; and there is only a fleeting image of Theo's father, an African-American musician. Theo's grandparents in Vermont have been against their daughter's interracial marriage from the start — but here is Theo, and what can they do except tolerate him with some impatience that the young Alice notices, giving her the first glimpse that this nice couple may not be exactly who she thought they were.

When Theo's grandmother ends up in the hospital with a stroke, the boy moves into the MacCauley home and spends the summer days with Alice. He brings with him fears of terrorists, tidal waves, bird flu — just to name a few. Alice begins to sense 'the horrible truth about the world, which was that it was falling apart,' yet she finds the transition a 'step as ennobling as it was frightening.'

The second friend that Alice makes is Kenneth, a man ill with AIDS who has come home to be cared for by his sister, Miss Fitzgerald. Alice and Theo go to the Fitzgerald home to read to Kenneth, and the descriptions of the ailing man are some of the best in the book. His eyelids have been 'hitched open and pinned to the jutting brow' with bandaging tape, and we see, along with Alice, the mixture of terror and grace that resides in him. They read to him from the journals of Lewis and Clark and eventually hatch a secret plan to make a 'rope walk' so that he can walk through the woods to the river, holding the rope for guidance.

The narrative weaves back and forth gently as pieces of information are filled in (Alice's mother had a cut above her eyebrow from a hail storm, just as Alice does; her brother, Wally, is a smoker and deep thinker, etc.). Some of this does not seem necessary or, at the very least, keeps the book at an unchanging pace. But then suddenly something quite amazing happens. The rope walk has an entirely different result from anything the reader — or these young people — expected, and the surprise is both shocking and a strange relief. Afterward, Alice really begins to grow up. 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's most recent novel is 'Abide With Me.'

" Reviewed by Elizabeth Strout, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"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." Library Journal

"This beautifully written novel captures the dignity and grace of a young girl coming into knowledge of herself and the world....[A] celebration of two special children and a memorial to innocence lost." Chicago Tribune

"Though Brown brings a formidable intelligence and elegant sensibility to her carefully executed literary novel, the result sometimes seems like required reading. Happily, any hint of fussiness is redeemed by her generous-spirited and energetic creation...of two engaging and memorable characters." Booklist

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 most recent 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.