The Rose Tree

Susan Patrick is a librarian at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.

A return to a hometown funeral triggers a series of memories for a
40-year-old woman living in Dublin. Roisin’s childhood recollections,
however, are told in retrospect by a sophisticated and shrewd observer
of character and nature. Mary Walkin Keane’s humorous and poignant
first novel captures the flavor of growing up in the repressive society
of a small town in Ireland in the 1950s. The pervasive influence of the
Church contrasts with the relative freedom and intellectual awakening
Roisin finds at a Dublin university in the late 1960s. Personal
reminiscences are interwoven with allusions to Irish mythology and
literature (the title is from Yeats’s poem “The Three Bushes”). A
strong current of mysticism parallels the events in the main
character’s life. Ultimately, it is Roisin’s re-evaluation of her
past—of the loves, deaths, and births that she has experienced—that
allows her to come full circle and face the present renewed.