Writing book reviews for the Rochester daily newspaper back in the 1970s launched Carol Weiss Rosenberg on a freelance career publishing profiles, features, and short stories in a variety of magazines, short story collections, and newspapers across the country. Now, she has published a young adult novel, Waiting for Prince Charming, about a teenager from “Oakport,” a fictional village located alongside the Erie Canal in Upstate New York. Rosenberg says adult readers have proven to be enthusiastic about the novel, as well.
The book centers around fifteen-and-a-half-year-old Joanne, the sensible, responsible kid in the Johnston family, for whom the summer days seem endless and routine. When a cute, smooth-talking traveler from out east shows up during her shift at Johnston’s Midwest Dairy Stand and invites her to join him on his road trip to California, she is flattered and tempted. She knows it’s crazy and possibly dangerous – a teenage hitchhiker has just been murdered nearby – but she despairs of anything exciting ever happening to her; this could be her last chance. She takes some money from the till, leaves a note for her mom, locks up the stand, and climbs into the stranger’s Porsche. As they travel west, Joanne discovers that Brice is many things, not all of them trustworthy or kind, but she is so in love with the idea of being wanted, she keeps finding ways to please him and excuse his quixotic moods – until the two are confronted by an emergency on the highway. The crisis plunges Joanne back into the childhood nightmare of her father’s death and forces her to choose between her dreams of romance and what she knows she has to do.
Woven into Joanne’s story are some of the tall tales her father used to tell his children about his great-grandfather, a nineteenth-century captain who piloted a barge up and down the Erie Canal, conquering ghosts and floods along the way. Joanne comes to realize that these wild tales of derring-do and family “history” contain clues to her own life and dreams.
“I lived and wrote in Brockport from 1973 to 1979, when my husband, an art historian, taught at SUNY,” Rosenberg said. “In 1980, when he joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame, our family moved to South Bend, Indiana, where I continued to write and also became executive director of the Firefly Festival for the Performing Arts. Art history research and sabbaticals led to sojourns in Florence, Italy; Providence, Rhode Island; and Rome, Italy, where local color seen through a visiting writer’s eye offered myriad subjects for reflection and writing.”
According to Rosenberg, the book “takes a nostalgic look back at life in Upstate New York while describing the adventures of two characters who lived near the Erie Canal: a courageous young nineteenth-century barge captain and a twentieth-century teenager with big dreams.”
Waiting for Prince Charming can be ordered from Lift Bridge Book Store in Brockport.
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