The Dark Rose by Erin Kelly
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a book about two damaged people finding comfort in each other, as their pasts crouch in the shadows and say “not so fast, guys…”
it is a breezy and tragic story that will creep up on you with its questions and solutions. its action bounces two characters back and forth in time: a teenager’s dangerous obsession with her philandering rock star boyfriend in the late-eighties, and her life “now” as a thirty-nine-year-old, living an isolated life restoring historic gardens and giving in to equally-obsessive mourning rituals for her lost love AND HER SEEEECRETS. our other character saw his father die gruesomely in front of him as a young boy, and now, at eighteen, is running from a dangerous situation straight into the arms of our lonely gardener. oddly enough, he looks just like her rock star boyfriend, so she gets to pick up right where she left off/never really left in her heart.
there are many wonderfully tiny details that please the reader, and it is a fairly satisfying, if a little too convenient, mystery/suspense novel.it is always nice to have two characters whose every wrong turn is so darn obvious, and you can only shake your head and say, “oh no—don’t do that!!!” if only it were so obvious in real life…
i am grappling with my star ratings here, because i gave her other book, The Poison Tree, four stars cats, but i think this is probably a better-written book. i think i will give them both a 3.5 in my heart and leave it at that. something in my brain is preventing me from writing a better review right now, and i apologize. i am in need of someone to point out my wrong turns, i think.
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