Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls - Hardcover

Danielle Wood

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1849822093 ISBN 13: 9781849822091

Publisher: M P Publishing Limited

Synopsis

Charming and thoroughly modern, Rosie shares with us her piquant and utterly engaging views on life and love, marriage and mating, desire and destiny as she tackles the sometimes thorny business of making her way through life. These are not, I should say at the outset, tales written for the benefit of good and well-behaved girls who always stick to the path when they go to Grandma's. Skipping along in their gingham frills - basket of scones, jam and clotted cream upon their arms - what need can these girls have for caution? Rather, these are tales for girls who have boots as stout as their hearts, and who are prepared to firmly lace them up (boots and hearts both) and step out into the wilds in search of what they desire. Taking her cues from the Brothers Grimm, Rosie - a thoroughly modern Little Red Riding Hood - tells us of love and desire, men and women, heartache and happiness. Beguiling, clever and funny, Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls is a sheer delight. With wit, simplicity and directness, Rosie offers her clear-eyed, slyly funny and rueful take on life, love and everything in between.

About this title

About the Author:

Danielle is a writer whose first novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark, won The Australian/Vogel Award Literary Award in 2002 and the Dobbie Award for women writers in 2004. Two of the stories from her most recent book, Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls, were published in the Best Australian Stories anthologies of 2003 and 2005. Rosie Little is soon to be translated into Italian, and Danielle is working on a screen adaptation. In 2004 Danielle was awarded an Australia Council grant for work on her third major creative work, a novel titled Of a Feather.

From Publishers Weekly:

Linked anecdotes about the perils of young womanhood from Australian author Wood trendily play off of antediluvian diction and antiquated women's advice columns, but actually possesses some hard-won wisdom. Divided into themes such as virginity, truth, art, commitment, marriage and loss, the tales treat the predictable muddle of female experience, though in the feisty literary persona of not such a "good girl." Indeed, the first story, "The Deflowering of Rosie Little," finds the narrator, at 14, eager to look up Latin words in the dictionary used in sexual relations, losing her virginity in the most demeaning fashion at a party to a coarse lager lout who offers her a popular cocktail for girls called "Rene Pogel" (read it backward). In another wacky tale that goes off the rails into reality, "Rosie Little in the Mother Country," the narrator, now 17, is sent for a long visit to her childless godparents' house back in England, where the joyless, emotionally numbed couple finds Rosie's sexual vivacity unnerving and finally insupportable. Despite corny sidebars on penis sizes, pubic hairstyling, and "Nominative Determinism" (you are what you're named), Wood addresses real issues: domestic violence, abortion and the desire to be married with children, among others. What emerges is a sense of destiny for Rosie, a woman who works hard-as a newspaper reporter and an assistant purser on an American cruise ship, among other things-and senses intuitively that a life of heartstrings' unraveling is surely worth a pull or two.
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About this edition

• Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
• ISBN 10: 1849822093
• ISBN 13: 9781849822091
• Binding: Hardcover