Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of The Winter Rose (Tea Rose, Bk 2)

The Winter Rose (Tea Rose, Bk 2)
reviewed on + 74 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2


Like The Tea Rose, The Winter Rose is another enjoyable story by Jennifer Donnelly. Once again, the characters are likable and the plot is compelling. In both The Tea Rose and The Winter Rose, if the reader can over-look the historical incongruities and vagaries of chance the story presents, they will be in for an epic-length treat.

The Winter Rose picks up the story of Joe and Fiona Bristow a couple of years after we last saw them (in The Tea Rose). They are now starting a family while still working at growing both Fiona's Tastea tea empire and Joe's Montague Grocery chain. Additionally, Fiona is obsessed with making contact with her brother Charlie who, as we found in at the end of The Tea Rose, is not dead but who instead has taken on the identity of a local bully, Sid Malone.

In this book we also get a chance to delve more into the story of Sid (Charlie) when he falls in love with a young woman doctor, India Selwyn Jones, and decides to leave the grifting life in order to make a new start with her in America. Sid and India soon find out how hard it can be to try to leave the crime world behind.

Seamus Finnegan is also back in this novel. He quit school in order to join Scott and Shackleton on their Discovery expedition to the South Pole. After that adventure, his romantic attention is captured by a young female mountain climber who he accompanies on a climb of Kilimanjaro.

I particularly enjoyed reading about a whole new set of characters while still getting a chance to check in with the cast of The Tea Rose to see where their lives have taken them since we last met. I also really enjoyed the villain, Freddie Lytton - pure evil with a gentile face. He really kept the story hopping.