The Sick Rose [Hardcover]

Don't plan on doing anything usful once you have started the Sick Rose, once you start you will find it hard to put it down and walk away. The book stays in your head and you find yourself thinking about what might happen, how the ends tie together, until you can sit down on the bus or the train on your way home and carry on reading.

I enjoyed the Poison Tree, but this book is even better, and almost...more complete.

Erin Kelly a rising star!!

For me, this is the sort of story that you really need to call in some favours, bunk off, shirk your responsiblities... do what it takes to give it your full attention until you've read it from start to finish. Within a couple of pages, everything else (including sleep) was an irrelevance and irritation, getting in the way of finishing the next chapter.. and the next...
A really satisfying read, gorgeously described, and the characters will stay with me for a long time. I can't wait for Erin Kelly's next book.

I read and enjoyed Erin Kelly's debut novel, The Poison Tree, a couple of months ago, and when I saw this new book was being released I couldn't resist snapping it up. I was glad to find that, while The Sick Rose is completely recognisable as the work of the same author, it's quite different from The Poison Tree - the storyline is fresh, the characters original, and thankfully it seems much less like it's partly targeted at the chick-lit market.

The Sick Rose has two main characters. 39-year-old Louisa is a botanical expert working on the restoration of the gardens of a crumbling country house. 19-year-old Paul is a petty criminal sentenced to community service at the site, the job literally a get-out-of-jail-free card in exchange for helping to put away his dangerous friend Daniel. Both protagonists, inevitably, are troubled, and they each get their own flashbacks: Louisa's take place twenty years before and describe her first serious relationship with wannabe rockstar Adam, whose death at 18 still haunts her; Paul's jump back seven years and cover the traumatic loss of his father and the start of his criminal career as Daniel's accomplice. As the story begins, a meeting between the protagonists triggers a violent reaction in Louisa, who thinks Paul is the spitting image of Adam.

The truth about the past is carefully unfolded, and as Louisa and Paul get to know one another and a tentative relationship develops between them, the flashbacks slowly reveal that Adam was in fact volatile and potentially unfaithful, and Daniel a possessive bully who conspired to make Paul's life hell for his own amusement. Paul is terrified that Daniel will catch up with him, while Louisa also seems to have something to hide and begins to imply that she was involved in Adam's death. Told in short, punchy chapters, the story zips along at a good pace. The writing isn't always what you'd call superb, and Kelly is often guilty of unnecessarily heavy description, but the plot is compelling and the switches between past and present do a great job of holding your interest. Sometimes there's a cliffhanger in one of the past sections and the following chapter returns to the present, leaving the reader desperate to find out what happened next. As you'd expect in a thriller like this, there are plenty of twists and turns, but I genuinely didn't see most of them coming. I don't want to spoil the ending, but it absolutely wasn't what I expected, and the epilogue is perfect.

While a few elements of the characterisation are a bit heavy-handed (there's way too many mentions of how young Louisa looks for her age, presumably so it doesn't seem too off-putting when she gets together with Paul), there are also excellent moments which stand out as particularly well-executed and beautifully subtle. Kelly has an eye for small, completely believable and excruciatingly human details, which suggest true literary talent. She's also excellent at writing about teenagers while still retaining an adult tone, capturing that mixture of nostalgia, embarassment and sadness you feel when looking back on your youth (even if that 'youth' is only a few years past, as it is for Paul). But, as with The Poison Tree, her adult characters aren't as successful. Perhaps it's partly because her age is constantly played down, but Louisa doesn't read like a convincing 39-year-old woman, though the younger verson of the character is totally believable.

I really think Erin Kelly is an author with a lot of promise. This and The Poison Tree are unlikely to be hailed as literary masterpieces, but there's something about her writing that makes me think she may well go on to greater things. Time will tell whether I'm right about this. In the meantime, I'm pretty sure I'll be reading anything else she writes.