Rouge / Bruce Knight.

Knight, Bruce, author

Aberdeen : Docken Green, 2024.

632 pages ; 21 cm.

Change can overtake you. Hope seems more elusive... In an east coast Scottish village in 1921, amid-post-war social upheaval, a fragile community clings to a fading past, many refusing to see that change is already happening, and inevitable. A young woman, Frances, is trapped in marriage to a war veteran, Joe, a poor provider who depends on casual earnings as a shoreman at Seatoun harbour. Desperate to earn money, and encouraged by her sympathetic grocer, Frances disguises herself as a boy and secretly makes deliveries to a circus which arrives, unexpectedly and controversially, near the village. There, Frances meets a forty-ish widow, stage name "La Rouge," an exotic dancer temporarily in the circus, who introduces Frances to a wider world and reawakens her childhood love of dance. Frances's problem is that, in good conscience, she cannot abandon her domineering, weak husband, even though he stands in the way of a fulfilling future. The book shows how an overarching Providence resolves her dilemma and sets her free to live again, in hope. At times gritty and realistic, Rouge looks sympathetically at an age of turmoil, showing that, with faith, even seemingly impossible situations can give way to creative solutions.

9781068552908 (pbk)

823.92

English

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