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Summary: The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
Review: I thought the Diary of Ellen was very interesting, although I was a little disapointed with Joyce Reardon's editing of the diary, I feel she could have included a lot more than she chose to. I kind of feel I was some how cheated out of most of the content of her diary. I think she should do another version and add the rest of the pages she omitted. Let the reader decide what is offensive or not.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't judge a book by its cover
Review: This was a great book I too couldn't put it down. So what if its real or not it makes for some interesting reading really spooky events happen I love the detail! If you like reading diaries for finding them hard to put down another good one is called The Diary of Mattie Spencer and the sequal to it is Alice's Tulips. Very cool how these two also tie in together. If they ever came out with a Rose Red Part two I would definatly buy it. I feel it was worth the time to read and enjoy a good book, real isn't always fun nice to know that someone can write a really good book and when your done reading say its not true right? Houses can't really feel alive?
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Summary: I really enjoyed the trip
Review: This was a great insight to the movie although i would like to have read it before the movie. I don't like going backwards. But i really got into the whole rose red thing. I looked up everything i could about it. Now i'm even trying to find the so called left out pages of the diary. But can't seem to get where i need to be to get them. I love reading and this was an awesome read for me. It kind of brings you into her life and reality of her misfortunes and her understanding of why she does some of the things she does. It just kind of takes you back to that time and away from todays problems. I could have easily read it in one setting but i made myself space it out. I look for to another lost diary that just happens to appear from out of thin air or should i say out of rose red rubble.
if anyone has figured out the trick to the lost pages post it here on the reviews and i'' check back. thanks. Its something to pass the time for me.
Rating: 
Summary: Only worth reading as a supplement to the miniseries
Review: I found this book to be an uncomfortable, rather disappointing read. Aside from its relationship with the Rose Red miniseries, I do not feel it stands very well on its own. I must say that the first fifty pages tainted the remainder of the story for me. I am certainly no expert on women, but I cannot fathom any woman, even a fictitious one, and especially not one writing about events in the early 1900s, writing the kinds of things found in this journal. This is not to say I am not well aware of the fact that many women have been victimized sexually by their husbands, or that many women have been greatly afflicted by their own confusing passions in this regard, but some of the early journal entries just seemed way over the top (especially the part about Ellen saving the bedsheets from her honeymoon). This journal struck me almost immediately as a man's attempt to write a woman's personal story. This book is important in that it helps explain some things presented in the Red Rose miniseries, in particular John Rimbauer's death in the tower and a more complete sequence of events surrounding the disappearance of Ellen's daughter April. I also found out a whole lot more about Ellen's relationship with her handmaiden Sukeena than I really wanted to know. In the miniseries, I never got a real grasp of Sukeena and her place in the whole story; this book does supply a lot of new information in this regard and details her pivotal role in events. I was a little surprised that more information about the house itself was not shared in these pages. While Ellen mentions hearing the house laugh and speak to her and the sound of continuing construction through the walls, she never offers a good description of the changes supposedly taking place in her home. She mentions having a sense that a hallway changed completely at one point, but she does not describe anything very extraordinary happening before her eyes--beyond bearing witness to the solarium sprouting jungles of plants and flowers in a matter of minutes. One cannot truly envision Rose Red based on Ellen's journal entries themselves. There were some effective passages in the journal, such as the part concerning Ellen's encounters with the ghost of a servant, but even these were in no way spinetingling. In terms of characterization, the true natures of the main characters are revealed rather thoroughly. Watching the miniseries, I felt sympathy for Ellen as the victim of a cold, cheating husband. Having read this book, almost all of the sympathy I felt for her is gone. In her way, Ellen was just as much a scoundrel as her husband. Her huge mood shifts between hope for her marriage and hatred for her philandering husband wore on my nerves, as did her vacillations between one decision or another. Oddly, enough, the character I now feel the most respect for is the house itself. Rose Red should have shuddered upon witnessing some of the debauchery that took place inside its walls, and I can understand why it would want to put a stop to the evils emanating from the house's occupants. All in all, fans of the miniseries should consider reading this book because it elaborates upon a lot of details and incidents omitted from the miniseries in regard to the early history of Rose Red. I personally believe it would have been a mistake to read Ellen's journal before watching the miniseries. On a few occasions, even the author seems to slip into a third-person voice, subtly referring to events that have yet to take place. in Ellen's timeframe. Anyone going into this book with no knowledge whatsoever about Rose Red is almost doomed to find little substance or satisfaction in these pages.
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Summary: Thrilling
Review: I love this book. I didn't know at the time this story was fiction. I thought this diary was real. It made the book more exciting. I couldn't put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Graphic, but good plot
Review: The mystery behind the story was good, but some of the content that went along with the story was unappropriate. It had an amazing plot, so easy to get ingulfed in, you could almost believe it to be real.
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Summary: A Rich Socialite's Fictionial Reality
Review: I knew that this book was a little work of fiction, coming to love Rose Red beforehand and finally deciding to pick it up just two days ago. Well, despite it's fair size, I finished it so quickly for one reason only: I couldn't put it down. At times, I was so involved with this strange piece of work that I began to empathize with Ellen Rimbauer and forget that she, in fact, wasn't a real person. That is a great feeling to evoke from your readers, and proves that indeed a fantastic storyteller wrote this book. It doesn't really seem like the style of Stephen King, though, and in fact didn't really seem like his writing at all. However, King fans and non-fans (I, myself, the latter) will enjoy this masterpiece equally. Even if you've seen Rose Red, this doesn't spoil the book at all. Entirely to the contrary. It provides answers to questions that stumped viewers from the extremely well written perspective of Ellen Rimbauer herself. I devoured it's 250+ pages in less than two days, and I'm sure that even if you didn't catch Rose Red that this should still make for an enthralling read. Bottom Line: this book contains the most realistic fictional characters I've seen in a very long time, a definite buy, but if you want to wait for Rose Red to be released on DVD before seeing it, you only have to wait until May.
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Summary: Couldn`t put it down.
Review: I thought it was a great book. I had hard time putting it
down at night.
Rating:
Summary: Misses More Often Than It Hits
Review: Stephen King's Rose Red, the first piece of fiction the author wrote after his unfortunate run-in with a van, will probably stand as a question mark on the otherwise shining moments of the later part of his career. The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is a fictional tie-in marketing piece, along with a fake website, a la The Blair Witch Project. Although the authorship of the book remains a question, it is likely not the result of King himself, as the voice is very much unlike anything else King has ever written - although it is not out of the realm of possibility to think that his wife, Tabitha, might have written it. The question, though, isn't whether the book is real or who wrote it - it's whether someone would spend his or her time reading it. Unfortunately, like the mini-series - and the marketing campaign for the series - My Life at Rose Red falls prey to some vicious problems that eventually doom it in the end. Reading like a subpar Edith Wharton novel, if Wharton were alive today and writing, the story itself is fractured beyond belief, and seems to run slalom between gothic romance, mystery, and obvious period fantasy. Notice the lack of the word "horror," because it wasn't scary - like the TV show, it pulled its punches way too early, and there was nothing left to be afraid of, because the reader knew what was coming. The relationship between Ellen and John Rimbauer was uninteresting, and it left the reader feeling nothing for Ellen's plight - she came across as being a two-dimensional caricature rather than a flesh-and-blood character. This book exists only as a marketing tie-in, but ABC dropped the ball with how to do it right. The book was only released a couple of weeks before the miniseries, so most people who heard about it did so because of the miniseries. If ABC wanted to build hype (which is clearly the point of the book), it should have been released a couple of months before the series - at least. As it stands, My Life at Rose Red is going to serve as a footnote to a sad chapter in King's canon, as the miniseries failed to deliver on all its counts. Intended as his own version of The Haunting of Hill House, King was originally involved with the 1999 remake The Haunting, and dropped out because of the bad CGI ghosts and schizophrenic storytelling. So what did Rose Red bring us? Bad CGI ghosts and schizophrenic storytelling. The first part of the series was byfar the best, as it built up a good feeling of dread, even if the audience felt no connection with the characters. The second and third parts, like this book, were so spastic and dumped all the surprises so early that there was no point in watching the rest - we knew how everyone was going to die. It isn't horror, and it isn't scary - which is too bad, because the potential in the haunted house genre provides for much more than we are left with in all of Rose Red's forms.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: I found this book interesting and entertaining. Ellen goes into detail so you feel that you are seeing the actual events taking place. Ellen also takes the reader on a journey that will leave the reader wanting more information on Rose Red.
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