Some narrators simply tell a story. Others make you feel as though they are sitting beside you, remembering it in real time.
Rosalind Rose does exactly that in Ian Hanes’s August: We Carry What We Bury.
From the beginning, readers encounter an unusual perspective: Rose is telling the story from beyond her own lifetime. She died in 1977, yet death has not separated her from the people, places and memories that mattered to her. She continues watching August Harper, the boy she loved and the world that keeps changing without her.
That immediately gives her narration an emotional tension. Rose knows how her story ends, but the teenage Rose inside those memories does not.
When she remembers falling for August, there is warmth and humor in her voice. He is the talented basketball player everyone notices. She is the Black girl sitting farther back in the bleachers, careful about attracting attention in a town where their relationship could quickly become gossip. Yet behind that caution is a teenager who is curious, outspoken, ambitious and very much in love.
Her personality comes alive most clearly in the moments she shares privately with August.
After basketball practices, they talk about what they want from life. August hopes for a scholarship to the University of Kansas. Rose dreams of becoming a civil rights lawyer and perhaps entering politics so she can change her small world. When she jokes that America will never have a Black president in her lifetime, August encourages her to imagine a world capable of changing.
That mixture of hope and hindsight gives Rose’s voice its poignancy.
Readers know she will never have the opportunity to pursue those ambitions. Rose herself, narrating from beyond death, knows it too.
But Hanes does not allow tragedy to become Rose’s entire identity.
She can be playful, sarcastic, observant, romantic, angry and occasionally mischievous. She comments on people around her, notices hypocrisy and offers opinions about history and society. Her personality prevents her from becoming merely “the girl who died.” Instead, readers experience her as someone who wanted things, questioned things, loved fiercely and expected more from the world.
Her narration also allows August to move beyond one lifetime.
Rose watches August after her death as he abandons his basketball ambitions, remains on the farm, grows older, becomes a father and continues carrying memories he rarely discusses. His visits to her grave reveal how deeply she remains part of his life even when nobody else understands what he is carrying.
Eventually, Rose’s perspective extends beyond Kansas as the novel explores history, injustice, loss, resilience and events affecting people across different generations and countries.
Yet the emotional thread always leads back to memory.
Near the novel’s conclusion, John finally understands who Rose was. Standing at her grave, he recognizes the woman whose life and loss helped shape his father. Rose watches as something buried for decades finally becomes known and she reaches peace.
That may be what makes her voice so powerful.
Rose is both part of the past and a witness to everything that follows it.
She reminds readers that a life does not become insignificant simply because it was short.
In August: We Carry What We Bury, Rose gets something history does not always give the forgotten: the chance to tell her own story.
And once you hear her voice, she is difficult to forget.
Discover August: We Carry What We Bury by Ian Hanes, available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3M2GCJJ/
