“The Winter Rose”
April 23rd, 2011 Posted in Books I've Read | No Comments »
“The Winter Rose” by Jennifer Donnelly
I loved this book so much! It is a tangent off of Jennifer Donnelly’s The Tea Rose (which is just as amazing). She keeps the plot thick and your heart racing through the entire novel. Each chapter is only a few pages, but you have to pause after every one to digest what just happened and brace yourself for what is to come. This book, like The Tea Rose, is full of murder, corruption, triumph, love, compassion, and so much more. There are an indescribable amount of emotions reached while reading. Since this is a spin-off of the first book, you feel a greater connection with the characters because you have endured their history (it is not required to have read the first book to be able to follow what is going on in this one, but I highly recommend it because that one is so good too). The setting is late 1800’s, early 1900’s, mostly in England, making their lingo so much fun to read.. which brings me to some of my favorite quotes:
“’Now get your things, old stick.’”
“’Birth pains are good for women. They build character and inhibit indecent feeling.’”
“She wondered now if Joe had forgotten the lesson they’d both learned- that the past was a restless corpse that never stayed buried. It crawled out of its grave again and again, trailing its bitter stench of sorrow and regret.”
“The sounds plucked at his nerves like fingers on a harp.”
“She had gray eyes. As pale and soft as a gull’s wing.”
“’Can your spotless conscience endure the stain?’”
“The tension was growing. It was a tangible thing now. India could feel it moving invisibly through the crowd like a tiger in the tall grass.”
“Where the stiff salt breeze would blow away the stench of his sins and the sea would wash him clean.”
“She could feel the river’s damp breath on her skin, hear the mournful clanging of the buoys.”
“It was a real laugh – loud and genuine. It made her cheeks flush and crinkled her eyes. It made her beautiful.”
“And once, years after he’d arrived in Africa, he’d taken off his clothing in a storm and lain on the ground, weeping for her, wishing the hard rain would pound the flesh from his bones and dissolve him into the dirt. But it didn’t.”
“India wiped tears from her daughter’s cheeks. Each drop that fell felt like acid eating away at her heart.”
“’I think the most amazing thing of all is the freedom. It’s not just a word here, is it? It’s a concrete thing. You can see it, same as you see the endless sky, or hear it, like the thundering of zebra. And feel it, like you do the sun on your back.’”
“’You’re nothing but a speck on the face of a monolith, one that’s been where it is since the dawn of time. But you don’t care about any of that. If you did, you wouldn’t be there. But you are there, daring disaster and death and all of it, a little flea climbing up a mountain.’”
“The smell and taste and feel of him felt to her like rains in a desert. Her soul, dry and parched, nearly dead, came to life again.”
“Can you smell despair? Joe wondered. Can you see it? Touch it? He had always believed it to be an intangible thing, a state of mind. Until he’d come to Wandsworth. Here it was real. It stalked the corridors, echoing in the hollow pok pok of the guard’s steps. It dripped down the gray granite walls, festering in their cracks, filling the room with its moldering stink. It seeped into flesh and bone, as chilling as the damp, creeping cold of a grave.”
“His blood splashed onto the golden grass; it pattered down onto the dark red earth.”
