Buy on Amazon: Roses by Leila Meacham
I pretty much devoured this book. With that said, there were a few things about it that disappointed me, but overall it was incredibly easy to read, very easy to follow and heart-breaking .. but not heart-warming as I had hoped it be.
This is meant to be a sweeping story a la to Gone with the Wind about families in Texas and their plantations and businesses. There’s broken romance, a secret offered at the start that will keep you reading, and some terribly twisted happenings.
I loved Mary and Percy and Ollie. I adored these characters and could picture them easily. I loved Mary for her determination, loved Percy for his class and loved Ollie because..well.. he was loveable. A few other characters really spoke to me as well, Wyatt being one. But there were characters I really just did not connect with. I had a hard time feeling anything for Rachel and Matt, as much as I longed to. Instead, I found myself wishing they were both more like Percy and Mary instead of being.. well, annoying.
The ending left me unsatisfied. Recently I’ve been stumbling across books that feel like they are just sort of haphazardly thrown together for an ending, as if the author thought, all of the sudden, “oh, I’ve passed my limit”. That was my biggest complaint about this book. I felt as if reading 600ish pages was enough to merit me a more satisfactory ending and not a cop-out. But, alas, that’s how it felt to me.
Not Gone with the Wind caliber by any means, but still an entertaining enough read.
