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Title: Rose & Poe
Author: Jack Todd
Narrator: Nigel Patterson
Format: Unabridged
Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-17-17
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
Set in mythical Belle Coeur County in a time not too far from our own, Rose & Poe gloriously re-imagines Shakespeare's The Tempest from the point of view of Caliban and his mother.
Rose and her giant, simple son, Poe, live quietly on the fringes of their town - tending their goats and working at odd jobs. Prosper Thorne, banished from his big-city law practice and worrying about his fading memory, obsessively watches over his beloved daughter Miranda.
When Poe erupts from the forest one day carrying Miranda's bruised and bloody body, he is arrested, despite his protestations of get help-get help-get help. Overnight, Rose and Poe find themselves pariahs in the county where they have lived all their lives. In the face of bitter hatred and threats from her neighbors, the implacable Rose devotes all her strength to proving Poe's innocence and saving him from prison or worse.
Rose & Poe is a tale of a mother's boundless love for an apparently unlovable child, and a stunning fable for our own troubled times. It will stick in your memory like sweet wild honey.
Members Reviews:
Lovely updated Shakespeare-based tale
Rose & Poe is a brief novel based nominally on Shakespeare's The Tempest, set in New England in the fictitious village of Belle Coeur. Not all the characters are direct analogs to those in the play, but the basic idea is the same.
Poe is something of a mutant--a gentle giant over seven feet tall, with six fingers on each hand, six toes on each foot and clear mental impairment. His mother, Rose, is a fixture in Belle Coeur who makes and sells goat cheese and sings with a country band in a local bar. Prosper Thorne is a wealthy retired attorney who was forced out of the practice by his partner and who is suffering from incipient dementia. His daughter, Miranda, is much loved in the community, especially by Poe, whom she's known all her life. Poe has been building a drystone wall for Prosper, and when Miranda returns from college, she visits him during the day, bringing brownies and such to him. One day, however, he carries her battered and unconscious out of the woods near the old quarry, where he used to work, and he's charged with the attack. He insists he saw someone else attack her and came to her rescue, but immediately afterward there's a major storm that obliterates all evidence from the crime scene, and he's put on trial. Most in the village are quick to jump to conclusions about Poe's guilt and ostracize Rose, but Rose knows he's innocent and hires attorney Lambert Caine to defend him.
There are other minor characters, like Airmail, the Ariel stand-in who works as a courier; Maeva Miller and her drug-dealing husband, who run a seedy camp for inner-city boys; and Moe and Skeeter, two boys who come to the camp every summer. Things turn out pretty much as you'd expect if you know the play.
Todd is a wonderful writer, capable of conveying a lot with elegant yet succinct wording.
As an aside, I was already well into Rose & Poe when PBS began broadcasting Ken Burns's The Vietnam War series, and I realized that the author, Jack Todd, was one of the people interviewed for the series, who had repeated screen time.
Four solid stars. BTW, there's a series of books being published that are takes on Shakespeare plays by famous writers. Margaret Atwood wrote the one for The Tempest, calledHag-Seed: A Novel (Hogarth Shakespeare).