The Garnet Red is the chilling and powerfully emotional story of three women.
Told in multiple voices, The Garnet Red chronicles the psychological and spiritual voyage of an elderly, but vital, woman and the two girls that she befriends along the way.
At age eighty-six, Rosa Frobischer buried her beloved George, a well respected screenwriter, and found that along with her husband, she had also interred her own identity. Casting aside her usual penchant for distractions and avoidance, Rosa yearns to discover who she really is.
Her search takes her from Hollywood back to Marionneaux, Louisiana--the place of her birth. There, she finds comfort in the friendship of Shelby Halifax, a spoiled debutante and Dove Ji, an overweight girl shocked into shyness by her parents' emotional abuse.
However, Rosa finds more than friendship in Marionneaux. Soon, she is tormented by seemingly inexplicable dreams in which she is drowning in a razor-sharp sea of garnets and haunted by vivid memories of her long-suppressed past. These nightmares lead Rosa down a terrifying path toward the snarling face of truth.
Reality insinuates itself further into Rosa's life when Dove's sister is found murdered. Soon after, Rosa's journey to wholeness begins as she faces her own trauma eye to eye and struggles to protect Shelby and Dove from a similar fate as they quickly realize that their own lives are founded in lies.
Best classified as literary fiction, this 110,000 word novel explores the themes of racism, rape, honor, self respect and survival. Divided into eight books, the story is told in many different voices through multiple diary-like entries that afford each character a chance to offer their interpretation of the narrative.
Following a symbolic pathway of color--from scarlet to white, The Garnet Red is a study in the effect that one man's misguided actions can have over an entire population.
This novel is the first of a trilogy. The second novel, The Cages of Marionneaux, is also available for publication. I expect to complete the third, The Elegant Ogress, by the end of the autumn of 2005. As planned, each novel will offer a metaphorical look at the different aspects of the inherent human condition of self-loathing.
Joseph Crisalli
Read a portion of the first book of The Garnet Red.
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