Rosamund Comes To Oregon

Had a good talk with Spooky Noodles tonight. He asked me when Royal Rosamond Press Co. started. I went into my old papers because I lost my site when I quit paying for jonrose@ufn.com Eugene Free Net. I didn’t know I would lose my page. The founding date was April 14, 1997. I found this in my collection of notes. The ignorant people who bought my late sister’s estate didn’t understand this is all they had to do. Johnson published 60 books.

John

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This thin picture book is a soufflee of nostalgia for an Anglo-Saxon heritage. Johnson intertwines the genealogy of the flower called Rosa Mundi with that of the English family sprung from Rosamund, a 12th-century noblewoman for whom the bloom was named. Rosamund’s descendants name their daughters Rosamund, and they tend Rosa Mundi throughout the Crusades, civil wars, impoverishment and migration to New England and, finally, a westward trek to the Oregon Territory. Frankly sentimental about family and continuity, the book will probably hold more appeal for adults than their progeny, especially given Johnson’s failure to explain any of the tumultuous historical events (“On the one side was the white rose, on the other the red” suffices here for the War of the Roses). The sections set in America are more tightly linked and more detailed, but the construct throughout feels inescapably contrived. Paintings are pretty yet superficial, their subjects as artificial as the text itself. Ages 5-8.

From School Library Journal

Grade 1-3?A family’s history is intertwined with that of a rose, for which many female descendants are named. The story begins in 12th-century England, and the rose is named Rosa Mundi for the lady Rosamund in whose garden it first bloomed. Cuttings from the bush are kept in the family through the Crusades, the Wars of the Roses, their migration to the New World, and their move west. When a modern-day young woman learns of the name of the flower, she decides to name her unborn daughter Rosamund. The narrative gives a good sense of the passing of time, but the story lacks tension and is too sentimental to interest most children. The artist uses a rich palette of oils to create historically accurate tableaux, but some of the paintings seem stiff and posed, more like portraiture than illustration. In addition, sources checked describe the Rosa Mundi as cerise or dark pink with white stripes, but the author describes (and illustrator depicts) it as a light flower with dark pink stripes.?Cheri Estes, Dorchester Road Regional Library, Charleston, SC

http://www.janicekayjohnson.com/bio.html

Then came my first sale to Harlequin, a Temptation. Two books to Silhouette Intimate Moments. Four to Kismet Romance (remember them?). Oh, and a regency romance, probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. Eventually I felt compelled to use that history degree, and wrote two books I still love, Winter of the Raven and The Island Snatchers, both published first in hardcover and then paperback by Forge Books and now available as ebooks. I’d probably still be writing books like them if, well, they’d made more money. What I discovered is that they took a lo-ong time to research and write. Something like a year each. And they didn’t make a year’s worth of income.