Only the Beautiful

Rosanne is the primary protagonist of the novel, and the first half of the narrative is presented from her first-person perspective. As a deeply dynamic character, Rosie undergoes drastic changes over the course of the story, for she is forced to endure hardship after hardship in the wake of the tragedy that opens the novel: the deaths of her parents and younger brother. An introverted and suspicious person, Rosie is described as “pretty,” with “wavy brown hair” and “sea blue eyes,” “full lips,” and a “slender nose” (24).

Although she is only 16 years old at the beginning of the novel, she matures a great deal in a very short time. One of Rosie’s key characteristics—and the one that indirectly causes her the most grief in her younger years—is her condition of synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the body’s senses are connected in unusual ways. In Rosie’s case, she sees colors whenever she hears sounds, and different colors appear in her vision that are associated with numbers, places, smells, and tastes. Because this condition is highly stigmatized and pathologized by the psychiatric community during Rosie’s younger days, her condition leads to the chain of events that results in her involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital in Sonoma, California.