rachelmanija (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rachelmanija) wrote2023-05-02 09:16 am
rachelmanija) wrote2023-05-02 09:16 am
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The Truth About Mary Rose, by Marilyn Sachs
Mary Rose, a ten-year-old girl in the 1960s, was named after her mother's younger sister Mary Rose, who died saving her baby brother and others in her tenement from a fire when she was only ten. Living Mary Rose is obsessed with her heroic namesake and really wants to learn more about her, but her family is oddly close-mouthed about her...
By itself, The Truth About Mary Rose is a minor but nicely written book about the perils of hero worship, the impossibility of ever learning the truth about a person you never met and who's now dead, and how when it comes to something as complex as a human being, there isn't going to be one truth anyway.
However, it's not a single book, but part of a series. In that context, its themes are much more startling and powerful. It's the last in a series written in the 1960s/1970s about kids in the Bronx in the 1940s. They weren't favorites of mine, but I liked the period details and that some of the kids were Jewish. I only read a couple of them, the ones involving the bully Veronica Ganz, who ends up making friends with her nemesis Peter Wedemeyer. From book to book, you see the kids from different perspectives. I picked up this book, which I'd never heard of before, because I was curious to see how little Mary Rose, Veronica's baby sister, looked from her own perspective. Guess I'll never know!
The heroine of The Truth About Mary Rose is Veronica Ganz's daughter. Veronica became a dentist and married a Latino artist. It was very startling to find that her sister Mary Rose, a minor character in the Veronica books, died in a fire a few months after the last of the Veronica books - and she comes across very differently in The Truth About Mary Rose than she did through Veronica's eyes. All else aside, it's shocking that this very ordinary little sister, who from Veronica's perspective is sometimes bratty and sometimes cute and often not paid attention to but always present, died unexpectedly and then was remembered as a saint or a villain, depending on who recalled her.
When living Mary Rose finally talks to her uncle Stanley (Veronica's baby brother, also a character from the original books), she gets a very different story than she heard from her grandmother. According to Stanley, original Mary Rose was a mean, selfish bully who saved no one and ran back into the tenement not to ring the fire alarm, but to grab her boxes of worthless magazine clippings, and that Stanley himself was the one who rang the fire alarm and saved everyone. (Stanley clearly needs some therapy regardless of what really happened, IMO.)
Living Mary Rose is shocked by this, but her aunt points out that dead Mary Rose was only ten, who knows what she'd have grown up like, and Stanley's version of events isn't any more authoritative than that of Mary Rose and Veronica's mother who remembers her as a saintly hero.
By itself, The Truth About Mary Rose is a minor but nicely written book about the perils of hero worship, the impossibility of ever learning the truth about a person you never met and who's now dead, and how when it comes to something as complex as a human being, there isn't going to be one truth anyway.
However, it's not a single book, but part of a series. In that context, its themes are much more startling and powerful. It's the last in a series written in the 1960s/1970s about kids in the Bronx in the 1940s. They weren't favorites of mine, but I liked the period details and that some of the kids were Jewish. I only read a couple of them, the ones involving the bully Veronica Ganz, who ends up making friends with her nemesis Peter Wedemeyer. From book to book, you see the kids from different perspectives. I picked up this book, which I'd never heard of before, because I was curious to see how little Mary Rose, Veronica's baby sister, looked from her own perspective. Guess I'll never know!
The heroine of The Truth About Mary Rose is Veronica Ganz's daughter. Veronica became a dentist and married a Latino artist. It was very startling to find that her sister Mary Rose, a minor character in the Veronica books, died in a fire a few months after the last of the Veronica books - and she comes across very differently in The Truth About Mary Rose than she did through Veronica's eyes. All else aside, it's shocking that this very ordinary little sister, who from Veronica's perspective is sometimes bratty and sometimes cute and often not paid attention to but always present, died unexpectedly and then was remembered as a saint or a villain, depending on who recalled her.
When living Mary Rose finally talks to her uncle Stanley (Veronica's baby brother, also a character from the original books), she gets a very different story than she heard from her grandmother. According to Stanley, original Mary Rose was a mean, selfish bully who saved no one and ran back into the tenement not to ring the fire alarm, but to grab her boxes of worthless magazine clippings, and that Stanley himself was the one who rang the fire alarm and saved everyone. (Stanley clearly needs some therapy regardless of what really happened, IMO.)
Living Mary Rose is shocked by this, but her aunt points out that dead Mary Rose was only ten, who knows what she'd have grown up like, and Stanley's version of events isn't any more authoritative than that of Mary Rose and Veronica's mother who remembers her as a saintly hero.
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I always had mixed feelings about the first five books. I enjoyed reading books with Jewish characters, even though the word "visibility" wasn't on my radar yet, but they weren't favorites. I can't exactly remember why at this remove, though. Just that there were many other books I'd rather reread.
Maybe I should try reading the entire series (Goodreads says seven in all).