The Rose Garden – Susanna Kearsley

After reading The Winter Sea I was pretty happy to find out that Susanna Kearsley had a new novel coming out. I pre-ordered this through the Book Depository but I think I missed the first run they had in stock and had to wait until more came in. It finally arrived on Monday and although I know I should’ve set it aside and opened Antony & Cleopatra, which is my next university text, I…didn’t. Instead I read this, knowing that it would just sing to me until I did and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on A&C.

Eva has just buried her actress sister Katrina and is a bit lost in life. Her job in publicity revolved around Katrina and now that she’s gone, Eva finds that there’s nothing to tie her to LA anymore, where she had been living. Her parents were killed in a car accident in Canada some years ago and Bill, Katrina’s husband has entrusted Katrina’s ashes to Eva. Katrina wanted them scattered but didn’t specify where and Bill thinks that Eva will best decide where they should go. Eva thinks long and hard about it, finally choosing Trelowarth in Cornwall England, where as children, Katrina and Eva spent summers with the Hallet family. Eva hasn’t been there in twenty years but she’s sure that this is the place that felt most like home and so she ties up her loose ends in LA and makes the trek back to England.

The Hallets have occupied Trelowarth, a huge dwelling set on a clifftop, since the eighteenth century. They breed roses, traditional varieties and the extensive grounds are given over to this occupation. As Eva settles back in to Trelowarth as a guest, trying to find some peace with Katrina’s death and her own stalled life, she suddenly finds the surroundings of Trelowarth as she knows it blending and changing into something that is familiar but not quite. She realises that she has stepped back in time to the early 1700′s, before the Hallets came to Trelowarth. Instead a man named Daniel Butler is in residence, and Eva finds herself drawn to him. Daniel is involved in some dangerous activities including supporting the exiled King James Stuart. He and his brother Jack run a ship, the Sally between England and France, importing and exporting and avoiding the local constable who is determined to find evidence of their doings.

Eva eventually comes to accept that she is slipping between the here and the now and 1715. It can happen at any time and she has no control over it. Thankfully, no matter how long she spends in the past, when she returns to the present, no time has elapsed. But she can be gone days from 1715, or longer, before she is swept back. Eva is drawn completely to Daniel, and soon she begins to feel more at home in the past than she is in her own time. She has to decide where she wants to be and if it can even be at all possible.

I’ve only read one Susanna Kearsley novel before this and there’s something comforting about them. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but they are perfect to bunk down with on the couch under a blanket and ignore the world for the day. And that’s pretty much what I did. At 470-odd pages, this novel is definitely no quick read but the pages just flew by and it never felt like I was deeply involved in a book of this size.

Eva is grieving for her sister when she decides to return to a place they haven’t been since their childhood. Welcomed with open arms by Mark and Susan Hallet, the brother and sister currently in residence, and their stepmother Claire who lives out in a cottage on the grounds, Eva decides to make herself useful while she’s staying there as a guest to help Susan with her ambition to open a teahouse. Fueled by Claire’s romantic story of how her grandparents met in one, Susan has decided that the abandoned greenhouse would be a perfect location and that the venture just might help pull Trelowarth out of the financial hole it has been sliding into over the last few years. She builds them a website and it’s while working in Mark and Susan’s late fathers office that she finds herself back 300 years, but still in the same room. At first she thinks Daniel isn’t real, something that amuses him greatly and after she returns to her own time she becomes convinced that she’s hallucinating. She has been prescribed some sleeping tablets by a doctor for her trouble sleeping and she decides they must be the culprit…but the ‘hallucinations’ continue after she stops taking the tablets.

Eva’s acceptance of her time travel is quite swift but really there’s no other option but to accept it. She clearly is in a different time and during her current time, is able to research a bit about the Butler brothers with the assistance of a local named Oliver. She once threw a rock at him when they were children, hitting him on the forehead. Oliver, all grown up now, runs a small museum in to village near to Trelowarth and makes no secret of the fact that he has never forgotten Eva. Eva is more drawn to the mysterious Daniel of the past though and it seems that he is equally as drawn to Eva.

Once again Susanna Kearsley has woven a beautiful and clever novel (which will become very apparent to the reader towards the end, after a moment of utter WOW!) with wonderful and rich characters. Eva is a grieving sister searching for her place in life, only to find out that it may be in a totally different time. Mark, Susan, Claire and Oliver are lovely secondary characters who help breathe life into the surroundings and the story itself. I changed my mind three different times throughout this story how I wanted it to end, who I wanted Eva to end up with and each time I changed it I lost no love for my previous scenario and to be honest, no ending could’ve disappointed me, which says something. Daniel and Jack, from 1715 are gentlemanly and dashing respectively and in the case of Fergal, the sort of character that every girl needs to have on her side. There’s nothing he doesn’t know, nor is there any assistance he cannot offer! The vile local constable provides an eerie villain who worries the reader for the safety of our 18th century heroes.

Definitely glad I have discovered this author. I’ve checked out an older book of hers from the library – going through her back catalogue as much as I can find!

8/10

Book #89 of 2011