Now available on Kindle and in paperback! SOLOMON RAMSDELL: A NOVEL OF THE CIVIL WAR ERA, a companion to ROSETTE

Click on the cover image to read a preview and order from Amazon.

He survived Andersonville . . . and then his trials really began . . .

 

"Touching without being sentimental, . . . a journey through trauma and grief that finds a happy ending not far from where it started."

     --An advance reader

 

Click on the image to read a sample or order from Amazon, or visit the Solomon page on this site to learn more and to order an autographed copy direct from Moraine's Edge Books.

 


ROSETTE and SOLOMON and "Blizzard" are always free with Kindle Unlimited!



The Kindle Version

 

Awesome Indies Books has awarded Rosette first the Awesome Indies Badge of Approval and then its more prestigious Seal of Excellence. Click the link to learn more.

The Illustrated Print Version

(Click to enlarge the cover)

 

Enjoy these images from among the twenty-four included in the illustrated print version of the book, available on Amazon or, if you prefer, Moraine's Edge Books (autograph and gift options).

 



Advance Praise for ROSETTE

     Rosette is a remarkable work, a tale well-spun. With every successive wave of joy and sorrow, loss and longing, regret and resolve, broken hearts and healing hearts, readers will be swept into this powerful story and its intimately drawn cast of characters, as I was. Cindy Marsch's writing style is often breathtakingly beautiful, but never purple (quite the writing feat). This is a provocative and delightful novel, not to be missed.

 

-George Grant, author of The Courage and Character of Theodore Roosevelt and many other titles

 

 

     I sat enthralled as I read and couldn't put the novel down. It recalls the work of Willa Cather or Laura Ingalls Wilder with the wonderful details of Rosette's day-to-day life in the structure of the journal. The style just suits the subject, with an impressive capturing of the 19th-century voices. Cindy Marsch alludes to the deeper feelings and underlying tensions in a way that the reader knows what is happening without the characters actually saying it. Rosette's version of her story is moving, her brother and mother add perspective, and her husband Otis reveals his control, his separateness.

 

-Joy O'Toole, Assistant Librarian, Central Rappahannock Regional Library, Virginia

 

     Rosette is a wonderfully written, engaging book. I am amazed at Cindy Marsch's ability to voice each of these characters believably, with light but appropriate use of metaphor, and I enjoyed living in their time. The story moves ahead at just the right moment, before we get overwhelmed with daily life. Rosette's marriage really is interesting, and I cannot wait to read the follow-up research. Perhaps with the publishing of Pioneer Girl the time is right for this novel.

 

-Cindy Ward Rollins, recipient of the 2016 Russell Kirk Paideia Prize, CiRCE Institute


The Journal and the Novel

     When almost-spinster schoolteacher Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell met Otis Churchill on a Michigan farm in 1856, she thought he might be the one. Her real-life journal tells what happened over the next two years. History tells what happened over the next six decades.
     The pages of this website share some of Rosette's actual journal entries and the historical background. The literary historical novel explores the deeper truth.
     In the novel we meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises a crucial page of her 1850s journal, then we live the journal's entries in the voices of Rosette and others around her. In careful detail, this novel by Cindy Rinaman Marsch traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes that have come to naught can rise from the wreckage.

"It is pleasant to be alone sometimes. We are free to act as we choose, having none but the Allseeing eye to spy our actions. I am now writing seated on a log, being on my way across the river."




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