Jennifer Donnelly's The Winter Rose is a breathless, rollercoaster ride of a novel. How do I even begin to describe such an epic story? It is 700-plus pages packed with love, romance, passion, thrills, angst, an occasional evil deed, cliffhangers and general page-turning goodness.
I must admit that I began this book earlier in the year, became quite captivated by the story and then the tension became too much, so I set it aside for a while. You know how you can get wrapped up in a story and so close to the characters that you fear for them? Well, I occasionally do that. I know it's just a book. It's only a story. It's not real. But I had this fear of bad things happening, so I did something I rarely let myself do. I flipped to the back of the book to see if I could tell how things ended. This is not recommended of course. It can be very misleading looking for names and places and key words to try and discover just whether things end well or not (I didn't read the last few pages, since that would well and truly be cheating). Well, it didn't quite end as I had expected it to--which is sometimes a good thing. Not to say there were not tense moments when I did pick the book up again, but when I did, I fell right back into the story and pretty much couldn't put it down again until I finished it.
The story actually starts with The Tea Rose, which I read years ago but never wrote about. This is a multigenerational saga that follows the fortunes of the Finnegan family. The Tea Rose begins in the late 1800s and is about Fiona Finnegan who builds a tea empire. The Winter Rose picks up in 1900, but it's Fiona's younger brother Charlie who takes center-stage. The story is told mostly through the eyes of India Selwyn Jones, an ambitious young woman who wants nothing more than to become a doctor and help the people of the East End, though her proper, exceedingly wealthy and very conservative family want her to make a good marriage like other young women of her station.
The East End is where the Finnegans had their start and it's these mean streets that Sid Malone calls home. He knows the ins and outs of the East End and has his fingers in every corrupt and criminal pot. This is much to the displeasure and sadness of his sister Fiona. The two have parted ways over his bad business dealings. In his misspent youth he faked his own death and took on the persona of Sid Malone, one of London's most-wanted men. On the outside he is ruthless, but on the inside just empty--his ill-gotten gains not serving to make him any happier.
Can you see the coming clash of personalities and where it will lead? India already has a fiancé. Freddie Lytton and India grew up together. Not meant for each other from the beginning, she already had one love growing up, they fall in together mostly out of convenience. Freddie is in reality just as ruthless, and perhaps even more so, than Sid Malone. Their ends and means might be slightly different, but one is by all appearances a bad man and the other one a bad man underneath the proper exterior.
There is a full cast of characters and several different storylines that will, as with any good story, converge at the end. There are moments that come close to melodrama, there are a few moments, too, where you might need to suspend disbelief just a little to fully enjoy the story, but I had no problem with either. Donnelly knows how to tell a cracking good story. Her characters are mostly shades of gray, though when she paints a picture of a villain, she paints it vividly (hence my momentary anxiety over what was happening to the characters I had come to like so much). Along with medicine at the turn of the century, the story also touches on mountaineering, moves from London's East End to British East Africa and even California.
Publishers Weekly called The Tea Rose a "comfortably overstuffed novel" and The Winter Rose is equally so. I am totally unapologetic in my love of stories like these. High art it may not be, but there is no slogging for me with a story like this. The story continues with The Wild Rose (the last of the trilogy), which I have sitting next to me even as I type. I would dive right in had I not already set myself the task of finishing a few other books. Perhaps I'll save it for my winter break at the end of the month, but I'll definitely be reading it soon. Jennifer Donnelly's The Tea Rose and her YA novel A Northern Light made my Favorite Historical Novels list--a list I should really revisit. I think I can happily add The Winter Rose to it. I won't give the ending away, but I will just say it was with a happy sigh that I turned the last page.