The Tea Rose - Book Review

 

The Tea Rose                                                        By Jennifer Donnelly

 

Fiona Finnegan, a girl infused with the caring soul of her mother and fighting spirit of her father, is the star performer in this big book. Author Jennifer Donnelly did a splendid job weaving two parental traits together to form the strong and likeable character of Fiona.

I liked the writing of the story with a pacing strung out well from beginning to middle to end. It is a story of happenstance where one event triggers another and another. Readers get to travel along and see the repercussions of choices and circumstances as they twist around and collide into one another.

Fiona did not try to be a strong, loving woman, she was just born that way; caring, strong and determined. Revealing Fiona in her weakest moments made her and her circumstances believable.

On the next to last page is where Fiona tells a determined little girl what her father told her when she was young, “The day you let someone take your dreams from you, you may as well head straight to the undertaker’s. You’re just as good as dead.”

In repeating this same saying from earlier in the story, the author wraps up the overall message she wants Fiona’s story to convey; never stop fighting for what you want or compromise your dreams for someone else’s. Fiona represents a dreamer who must go through the trials and tragedies of life while trying desperately to hold on to her dreams.  And it is the one dream that she holds so dearly to that makes all life’s challenges worth fighting for; to reunite with her love Joe.

As I try hard to remember something unlikeable about the novel, I am hard pressed to dredge up anything. I do remember a few times feeling as if resolutions to some problems were too convenient or coincidental; (Fiona getting passenger tickets, Fiona getting the bank loan, Fiona getting the tea house). The resolutions did not interfere with the smooth flow of the story and I accepted them without further critique.

I also would like to have seen Will’s son get exposed and punished for setting up the arrest and scandal against Nick Soames, as well as the crooked judge who carried out the legal favor.

The Tea Rose was 544 pages of cheering for love and goodness to overcome hate and evil. Often in a novel the ruthless, hating characters seem to say and do the most courageously memorable things. The Tea Rose gives those moments of incredible courage and risk to our heroine and her supporters.

And, of course, the love story is one that pulled me in from the start. Following the love story, or more of a yearning story, is like watching a vessel travel across dead lakes, stormy seas and raging rivers before unexpectedly crashing and sinking deep down into the depths of a foreign harbor.

The main item that kept me coming back was the suspense of waiting to see if and/or when this vessel of love would rise above water once again to rightfully take its place at the heart of the story. I think this a better love story than Francine River’s “Redeeming Love.” In Rivers novel the relationship was more a higher spiritual love of God, whereas in this novel the love between man and woman was so imperfectly relatable and familiar; common.

It was joyous to return to the big book of Fiona’s story again and again, picking up wherever the tale last left me. It is also why I love paperbacks and hardcovers over e-books; the weight of a book in my hands, along with the look and smell of its pages and cover, somehow gives me ownership of the story while traveling through its pages. You can say I feel closer to the characters and towns. Like carrying around a neighborhood.

I hope to write to this author letting her know just how entertained I was reading her novel. I will likely read one or both books that continue The Rose Trilogy; The Winter Rose, The Wild Rose.

I need more time to digest what I read and review my notes. But this I know without needing more time; The Tea Rose was a superb read and I am more than happy to recommend it to other readers.

Jan 3, 2021