Read Rosetown free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Cynthia Rylant's Rosetown is a gentle story for 9 year olds about a girl, a bookshop chair and a year when things at home are changing.
Flora Smallwood is nine and lives in a small town in Indiana in 1972. Her favourite place in the world is a purple velveteen chair in the window of Wings and a Chair Used Books, where her mum works three afternoons a week.
It's been a hard year. Their old dog Laurence died in the spring. Then her parents decided they needed to "take some air", and now Dad lives in a white house five streets away. Flora goes back and forth, and whatever she needs is always at the other house. Fourth grade feels very different from third, too.
Nothing dramatic happens, and that's the charm of it. Flora makes friends with Yury, a new boy from Ukraine with owl glasses and a very dry sense of humour. A white cat with a yellow-tipped tail turns up under the barber's steps. Yury gets a puppy called Friday, and Flora starts piano lessons with a teacher in a Rolling Stones T-shirt.
It feels like being wrapped in a blanket. Cinnamon toast, old films on the television, a dog-training class at the back of the hardware shop. (Flora and Yury even have a joint tornado plan, just in case.)
Flora is sensitive and thoughtful. She takes her time and turns things over in her head. If you've got a reader who feels things deeply and doesn't love big, noisy stories, they might really find a friend in her.
The sad things are there from the very first page. Laurence's death is backstory, told very gently, and the separation is handled with lots of love on all sides. Flora knows both her parents love her, and she loves them right back. Her dad gets low sometimes about the war in Vietnam on the evening news, which is about as close as the wider world comes.
It's an American book with an old-fashioned feel. There's something very soothing about a story where the biggest drama might be a sprained arm just before puppy graduation.
If they love the idea of a girl whose happiest place is a bookshop, try Tilly and the Bookwanderers. Tilly lives with her grandparents above their London bookshop and has been everywhere in the world through her favourite books.
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