In Search of the Rose Notes by Emily Arsenault

In Search of the Rose Notes is Emily Arsenault's follow up to The Broken Teaglass, a novel previously reviewed here on the blog. I was looking back at previous posts and when I clicked through Teaglass' I decided to head to amazon to see if Arsenault had published a follow up yet. Sometimes these new authors can be tricky--some take forever to publish another novel, some never publish another novel. I'm still waiting for Ronlyn Domingue's follow up novel to The Mercy of Thin Air--and I've been waiting five years for it! I'm also wondering when Katherine Howe will publish a follow up novel to The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Anyway I went to amazon and that's how found out Arsenault had published a second novel.

While Notes doesn't have as unique a premise as the setting of a dictionary company, poetry plays an integral role in this novel. The narrative is split between 1990 in the months leading up to and those following the disappearance of Nora's best friend, Charlotte's babysitter, Rose, whom the girls idolized, and 2006 in the wake of the discovery of Rose's bones buried in wicker by a pond shore that spurs a short lived reunion between the currently estranged friends.

The 1990 narrative is told from the perspective of eleven year old Nora, who sees and intuits things about Rose that Charlotte doesn't see or refuses to acknowledge. It's clear that there are currents of secrets running beneath the surface that eleven year old Nora cannot grasp.

The 2006 narrative sheds light on the current estrangement, personalities and dispositions of Charlotte and Nora as they recall that last summer with Rose and struggle to make sense of the discovery of her body so many years later. Communication between the two friends is stinted, frought with their shared assumptions regarding past history, marked by the tragedy of Rose's disappearance, and prone to misunderstandings due to false assumptions.

When Nora discovers a series of anonymous poems entitled "You" that were published in the high school literary magazine her senior year, years after Rose's disappearance and then discovers Rose's long forgotten dream log the girls kept that long ago summer, Nora realizes the poems were drawn verbatim from Rose's dream log. Both Nora and Charlotte each assume the other wrote and submitted the poems only to find that neither of them did. But if neither girl wrote the poems, then who did? And how are they connected to Rose's disappearance?

This is a novel as much about the boundaries and dynamics of friendship as it is a mystery about a disappeared girl. The story of Nora, Rose, and Charlotte easily and completely sucks the reader into its pages and the novel reads fast. The characters are distinctly drawn--though readers will find themselves exasperated with Charlotte. Ultimately the resolution is quietly devastating.

I recommend you check this book out the next time you visit the library.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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