Rosa’s Reviews > Before Dorothy > Status Update

494 Aunty Nell finally encouraged Auntie Em to turn her prairie journal into a book about those hard years.

485 They all move to California to be with sister Nell and her family.

488 Life before Dorothy was an adventure. Live after was a whirlwind. And what joy she blew into our hearts.

492 Seven years passed before the rain returns to Kansas and the prairie bloomed, once again, in all the colors of the rainbow. It would be many more years before I returned to finally see for myself…

434 Leo shook his head, unable to meet Emily’s eye. “I was afraid to be a father. As I tell you, I am forever a boy. I want the pleasure of your sister, not the responsibility of a child.”

465 Home was wherever she wanted to be most, right now, that was here, in the hospital, beside dear Dorothy.

466 (Adelaide) “I don’t mean material things. I mean what you have with Henry and Dorothy. A family. Love.”

411 The town hires a rainmaker and he turns out to be the Amazing Aerialist Mr. Stregone. He is Annie’s lover ad father of Dorothy. Dorothy calls him her mother’s ’special friend’.

296 Enter Adelaide Watson, a pilot.
this here’s Jenny. One of the best or, at least, she was, in her heyday.
I’m part of a group called the Ninety-Nines, a special club set up for female pilots and aviators.

284 Wilhelmina West is a mean lady. She scares Dorothy and Emily cannot hold back her anger.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t go around throwing accusations at innocent children.”
… watched as Wilhelmina jumped onto her bicycle and set off, ringing her bell harshly at a group of boys playing hopscotch in the street.

258 Emily gives Dorothy a Connemara marble that she had gotten from her mother.
“Irish Green, they call it back in Ireland. Those crystals, millions of years old.”
“Each one different from the next.”

Connemara marble is a rare, 900-million-year-old metamorphic stone found only in County Galway, Ireland

244 News of the stock market collapse hit the wires at noon a week later. Reporters called it Black Tuesday, the worst day in the history of the stock market.
Henry was ashen faced as he crouched beside the Millers’ wireless radio in the general store and listened to the latest bulletin.
14 billion of stock value lost. Investors have lost everything.

After the tornado demolishes their home, the neighbors rally and help Emily and Henry.
235 This is what life has come to, Emily whispered as they lay stiff and brittle as rusted old nails in a made up bed in the Millers’ living room. Funeral dresses, and old coat linings for shits, and hand-me-down boots.

201 May Lucas said: “I’d put my Zeb on the next train out of town if I could afford to.”
202 (I married him) Because he asked me before anyone else, and because my folks couldn’t afford to keep me at home. I should have married Fred Issacs. Loved him all my life, but it wasn’t meant to be for us. I still think about him. Only time I ever think about Zeb is imagining him six feet under.”