The Rose Revived

Rating:
Summary: A Lovely Book
Review: "The Rose Revived" is hilarious, romantic and just the thing for a Saturday afternoon. Though the endings are predictable, it's not so much what happens that's interesting but how the characters react. Full of laughs and love, I recommend this book to anyone who's feeling slightly down.

Rating:
Summary: A Lovely Book
Review: "The Rose Revived" is hilarious, romantic and just the thing for a Saturday afternoon. Though the endings are predictable, it's not so much what happens that's interesting but how the characters react. Full of laughs and love, I recommend this book to anyone who's feeling slightly down.

Rating:
Summary: A Juggling Act
Review: But a good one. Katie Fforde manages to tell the story of not one, but three very different women with this one tightly written book. Three women from very different paths start a cleaning service in order to make ends meet - along the way, the actress meets the farmer (and supplies most of Fforde's trademark humor), the repressed artist meets the successful artist (and regains her son), and the determined free spirit meets the lawyer (her family does supply a few laughs around Christmas). The road isn't smooth for any of them, but the lessons learned by all are wonderful. I highly recommend any book by Katie Fforde, especially Living Dangerously and Wild Designs.

Rating:
Summary: Romantic Fiction with Humor and Intelligence
Review: Have you tired of the romantic fiction available today? Are you downtrodden by the saturation of emotionally tormented alpha males, and sexually promiscuous "virgins" in romance novels? Do you yearn for serious fiction that is also lighthearted, romantic, and encourages you to pull an all-nighter to finish? And upon completing, would your perfect ending be one that caused a slight smile of satisfaction in addition to a bit of sadness that it was over?

Well, I believe Katie Fforde's novel A ROSE REVIVED achieves these goals. It is so refreshing to read a novel populated with intelligent and compelling "real" people who live ordinary lives yet intrigue us with their humor, their struggles and their dreams. And weaved throughout the book are three subtle yet satisying romances that will keep you turning the pages all through the night.

I highly recommend this book as well as Katie Fforde's latest WILD DREAMS and look eagerly forward to more from this author in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Fforde's First Was Her Best
Review: It's hard to compare Katie Fforde books, because they are ALL so absolutely delightful, something like a delicate sherbet after a meal of lambchops!

But "The Rose Revived," which was the book that catapulted her to fame, is just wonderful. Highly reminiscent of one of her later books, Life Skills (which I guess cannot be called reminiscent, since it came several years later), this is the story of a cheeky girl named May who lives on a canal boat. Feisty, self-sufficient and used to a bit of hardship, May is now facing true disaster: She has lost her job and her nasty mooring master(something like a landlord) is threatening to sell her boat's mooring berth out from under her if she does not come up with the considerable debt she owes to him.

Fast forward to a nasty man dubbed Slimeball, who offers May and two equally desperate young women--Sally, an out-of-work actress, and Harriet, a single mother in danger of losing custody of her son, jobs as a house cleaners for his agency. The women take the job--even though nobody but Harriet has ever truly cleaned a house. A wild and woolly adventure begins.

Will Slimeball pocket all the women's hard-earned profits? Will Harriet become a famous artist, keep her son, and incidentally make her sexy art teacher notice her? Will May keep her beloved boat, The Rose Revived? And what of Sally, who, up until now, has relied only on her beauty and stick insect body to make her way in the world?

I defy anybody to read this book without breaking out into huge smiles. This is the type of book where, when you reach the last page, you emit a huge sigh and then read the last chapter all over again just to keep from ending it.

Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: A Lovely Book
Review: Rather predictable, this book concentrates more on how the characters react to what happens than what happens. Hilarious and romantic, this book is just the thing for a saturday afternoon. I recommend it to anyone who's feeling slightly down.

Rating:
Summary: A Lovely Book
Review: Rather predictable, this book concentrates more on how the characters react to what happens than what happens. Hilarious and romantic, this book is just the thing for a saturday afternoon. I recommend it to anyone who's feeling slightly down.

Rating:
Summary: A Juggling Act
Review: This book was just what my title says. It was an average book with nothing that really stands out about it. It look four days to read and for me that is a huge amount of time. I just couldn't sit down and read it in one sitting. It was almost too heavy. At the begining Ms. Fforde tried to write in the "english" language, well for an American, it was very hard to read. Finally she stopped and from then on, I didn't have to half way guess what the characters are saying. The story is a little hard to follow in that the three characters lead almost seperate lives. The only thing they have in common is that they live and work together and that is not even discussed that much. It was much more like trying to read three stories that were interuppted and had big time gaps. I guess if you didn't have anything better to do this book would fill a couple of days.