While the rest of the family is dealing with adjusting to their new life, Mary Rose initially thrives, making a fast friend with her cousin Pamela, and being doted upon by her grandmother, who is thrilled that Veronica named her after Mary Rose.

Her namesake, Veronica’s daughter Mary Rose Ramirez, worships her dead aunt, and is fascinated by the stories her grandmother tells her about the beautiful, saintly girl that died warning the neighbors. Mary Rose Ganz is nowhere to be found, because we learn in the opening chapter that about a year after the events of Veronica Ganz she was killed in a house fire. Petronski has also mellowed out a little bit, although she still expresses her disapproval of Veronica’s husband (divorced, “artistic” and worst of all, Puerto Rican) and Stanley’s wife (she disapproves of her staying home with her children and “living off of” Stanley). When they move back east, they initially stay with Veronica’s mother, and do their best to get along. Ganz” and a contented homelife with her three children as “Mrs. Now middle-aged, Veronica has mellowed out, established a successful dental practice in Nebraska as “Dr. The Plot: More than thirty years after the events of Veronica Ganz,the Ganz/Petronski/Ramirez family is back in the Bronx, following a series of events including the death of Veronica, Mary Rose and Stanley’s beloved stepfather their battle axe of a mother suffering a broken hip and Veronica’s artist husband having finally gotten his big break: a show at the Museum of Modern Art and a position teaching at the Art Students League.

While in the past I have described her books as “weird and violent,” recounting an unsentimental past which takes a much more casual attitude towards physical violence and parental neglect, in this one Sachs deals with what turns out to be generational trauma and subjective truths in a way that is extremely sophisticated for its target audience. Was Aunt Mary Rose really a hero? Or has Mary Rose been living up to a lie?īackground: Marilyn Sachs is best known for a number of interconnected middle-reader books set in a pre-Robert Moses South Bronx in the early 1940s.

Peter and Veronica by Marilyn Sachs