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adl2990's review
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.5
stephaniealysse's review
emotional
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Physical abuse, and Alcoholism
Moderate: Child death
Minor: Suicide and Rape
meme_too2's review
1.0
This book was a huge disappointment. First of all it isn't a book about quilts or quilt-loving people, like all the rest have been. Second, the heroine was a moronic idiot. She didn't have any character at all.
Rose has a childhood friend who she refuses to marry because he drinks too much. So, instead she ends up marrying a wife-beater. Her first and fifth child come from her childhood, drunk-but-still-a-good-man sweetheart. The other six children have celiac disease and it takes her forever to figure out how to save her dying children. She knows they don't get sick when they eat corn tortillas, but she feeds them white bread because the doctor said so, like a good little soldier.
Is it okay that she takes a lover, but stays with her abusive husband? What kind of loser is she?? Finally, she runs away from her husband and hides in the canyon during a rainstorm, taking her sick children with her. Really?????
She and her sweetheart, and the children, finally run away to wine country in the middle of prohibition. No one is making money, but these wobegones are hired anyway. They accept charity even though they are sitting on a suitcase of bootlegger cash, which they eventually buy a winery with. Hello--your sweetheart is an alcoholic! Then Rose, who is as weak as a character can be starts making deals with bootleggers.
It’s fine if a main character isn’t likable, but she has to be believable, and I just didn’t believe Rose and any of her circumstances.
Wow! Jennifer completely lost it with this book!
Rose has a childhood friend who she refuses to marry because he drinks too much. So, instead she ends up marrying a wife-beater. Her first and fifth child come from her childhood, drunk-but-still-a-good-man sweetheart. The other six children have celiac disease and it takes her forever to figure out how to save her dying children. She knows they don't get sick when they eat corn tortillas, but she feeds them white bread because the doctor said so, like a good little soldier.
Is it okay that she takes a lover, but stays with her abusive husband? What kind of loser is she?? Finally, she runs away from her husband and hides in the canyon during a rainstorm, taking her sick children with her. Really?????
She and her sweetheart, and the children, finally run away to wine country in the middle of prohibition. No one is making money, but these wobegones are hired anyway. They accept charity even though they are sitting on a suitcase of bootlegger cash, which they eventually buy a winery with. Hello--your sweetheart is an alcoholic! Then Rose, who is as weak as a character can be starts making deals with bootleggers.
It’s fine if a main character isn’t likable, but she has to be believable, and I just didn’t believe Rose and any of her circumstances.
Wow! Jennifer completely lost it with this book!
jbarr5's review
4.0
Sonoma Rose
This part of the quilt series is about Rosa in CA and she's had enough abuse and she and the children are fleeing along with John's strongbox. Her husband did not like her parents and they were not allowed at family events.
She grabs the family quilts and photos and she knows John will follow her to the mesa, but he doesn't know of the caves...Her childhood friend Lars might be able to help save her and the children. Lots of secrets as to who the father is of the children but he just wants to protect her.
Chapters go back in time to when they first met, who she selected for her spouse, etc With chapters of present time we are able to follow her life after she's left with help to tend to her children so they won't be so sick..
Love the travel and how she seeks out doctors to help the kids. Like that he stands by her and that others are trying to shut down the moonshiners.
Liked hearing of the process of wine from grapes.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).
This part of the quilt series is about Rosa in CA and she's had enough abuse and she and the children are fleeing along with John's strongbox. Her husband did not like her parents and they were not allowed at family events.
She grabs the family quilts and photos and she knows John will follow her to the mesa, but he doesn't know of the caves...Her childhood friend Lars might be able to help save her and the children. Lots of secrets as to who the father is of the children but he just wants to protect her.
Chapters go back in time to when they first met, who she selected for her spouse, etc With chapters of present time we are able to follow her life after she's left with help to tend to her children so they won't be so sick..
Love the travel and how she seeks out doctors to help the kids. Like that he stands by her and that others are trying to shut down the moonshiners.
Liked hearing of the process of wine from grapes.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).
tracey_stewart's review
3.0
Received from Netgalley for review, thank you. I put in a request for the book based on the synopsis; this was a little outside of my usual well-worn paths, in a few ways. I've read little in this setting, time or place or cultural, and little enough in this broad genre, and I was attracted to the idea of a Prohibition-era vineyard. It's an aspect of that time in history I'd never considered – the incredible tight spot family vineyards were placed in by that national mistake. I know I tend to be perhaps overly critical of romances, and it isn't fair to the writer or publisher for me to take on a book that comes to me with that handicap (though holding them to the same standard as other books shouldn't be unfair) … still, it sounded like a story I wanted to know. There were mixed, not altogether negative, results.
As the book opens, Rosa lives with her husband and four surviving children on a rye farm in southern California, and nothing is simple. Her husband, John, is not the man she loves, and he knows it, and makes her pay. The four children are only half the number Rosa has borne, the other four having died horribly young of an unexplainable wasting disease (which I diagnosed, wrongly – I was close though). She watches in despair as two of the survivors seem to be going the same way. The other two have a reason for not being ill which did not sit well with the way I expected this book to go (and I never was entirely comfortable with it). For some reason I went into this expecting a Christian romance of some degree. And while the text was refreshingly free of Romance Novel Sexese™ (not a throbbing body part in sight), and while Rosa at least is nominally Christian, the characters are not chaste, nor do they behave in a particularly Christian manner. At all. Ever, really.
Rosa's husband is … well, I'm certainly not about to say she earned any of the treatment he gave her, but if she had entered into the marriage honestly and actually put her past behind her and applied herself (as teachers like to say), John might have had the foundation he needed to be a better man. Maybe not; his temper was formidable and maybe someday when she burned dinner he would have started hitting her. Regardless, as the book starts, she is terrified of him, and has good reason to be – and so I was surprised at the flashbacks that showed him controlling his anger and actually making the effort to be as good a husband as he could. Not, I want to be careful to state, that there is ever any valid excuse for a man to ever hit his wife – but it has to be said that Rosa treated him like a not-entirely-welcome houseguest because she was still in love with Lars, the man who fathered the child she gave birth to seven months after she married John … She lied to him, married him only to cover her pregnancy, and betrayed him, and he figured it all out; it doesn't take a psychologist to figure out why John was a bit put out. In other words, neither of them was innocent
I guess I'm not terribly fond of Rosa. Or Lars. Definitely not John, though I don't blame him for his anger – he's a horrible person when we meet him, and no amount of excuses will take that away.
A few of the minor characters were quite likeable and interesting – I would like the rest of the story of Elizabeth and the Triumph Ranch, for example, and in the Sonoma Valley there are some friends and neighbors I quite liked … Actually, I hate to say it, but I just realized that the histories of a great many of the minor characters here would make for a much more interesting reads than Rosa's story, at least once catastrophe strikes and Rosa takes the children and flees to, eventually, Sonoma. All resolution to the first half of the book happened off-stage – from the halfway point it was a whole new tale with almost no connection to the rest.
It may be odd to say it, but the problem I have with Sonoma Rose is that it's too much like a chunk out of reality: no one is blameless (except the children, and one of them is a brat while another is a little saint, both of which can be annoying extremes); events happen sometimes because of previous actions and sometimes just because they happen; people you want to like do things you can't like or in ways you can't like; and along the way a lot of loose ends are left flapping in the breeze.
I will credit this book for making me look deeper into Prohibition, because I had to do some digging in light of the predicament of the vineyards Rosa and Lars become involved with. Again, life-like, there are no answers; the story takes place pretty much smack in the middle of Prohibition (which was 1920-33, if you're wondering), and leaves off with absolutely no indication of whether the wineries manage to survive. It made a difference in my experience of the book to know – once I figured it out – that there were years yet to endure of Prohibition rather than, as I'd hoped, the end being in sight. (It also took far too much work just to figure out the really pretty important detail of exactly what year it was (1926 or 27, I believe, was the figure I wound up with): "Let's see, if that child was four when Prohibition began, and he's – hm, how old? Two years younger than this one who is seven, and if it all started in 1920, then …" (<- probably inaccurate recreation from memory)).
I disliked the choices made by Rosa as the second half developed (for one thing, as Lars himself points out, an alcoholic living at a winery can't be a good idea), and I disliked the manner in which some of the choices were followed through; there was a level of carelessness about the main characters' safety and minor characters' feelings that didn't fit with how I thought I was supposed to see Rosa and Lars. I just didn't like them. It is life-like – but that does not make it a well-told or enjoyable story.
Sonoma Rose is listed as part of the Elm Creek Quilts series. I'm not entirely sure what this means, apart from an assumption that the heroines of all the books will be quilters; from what I see on Jennifer Chiaverini's site there seem to be several present-day novels set around a shop with the same name as the series. How this book ties in, I have no idea. This concentration on a craft worried me a little, actually, because this sort of theme is so often so badly done – but the quilting, while not the star of the book, was an organic part of it, a tie between Rosa and her mother and then between Rosa and her children. The quilts are the natural symbols of home and warmth and comfort, but the concept is not beaten into the ground, happily … though puzzlingly, considering the series title. The book didn't exactly make me want to rush out and buy fat quarters and batting, and I learned nothing about quilting in the course of the read (and there were no patterns, which is almost unusual nowadays) … but I definitely don't need another hobby, and a lack of instruction is a very small price to pay for the lack of Cute. I don't think there's a syllable of Cute in here, even in the children's scenes.
The writing was a little stiff, but not terribly so; I wasn't enamored of the style, but it wasn't actively off-putting. There was a distance kept between what was happening on the page and me, the reader, so that I never was moved by the sufferings of the family, nor gladdened by their successes. Rosa's history is told in strategically placed flashbacks, but unfortunately there is no mechanism to alert the reader that what follows is or is not a flashback, so there were a few times when I'd come to a screeching halt as I tried to reconcile the appearance of a character I knew to be, in the book's present, dead. Characterization felt a little shallow, and a lot inconsistent – some of those decisions I mentioned earlier seemed completely out of the blue, or somehow off. But, still and all, while I obviously found a lot to criticize, I didn't hate it; there are stories in there somewhere, and I'd be willing to give another of Jennifer Chiaverini's books another shot to see if it's more successful. Several seem to take place during the Civil War, which helps.
As the book opens, Rosa lives with her husband and four surviving children on a rye farm in southern California, and nothing is simple. Her husband, John, is not the man she loves, and he knows it, and makes her pay. The four children are only half the number Rosa has borne, the other four having died horribly young of an unexplainable wasting disease (which I diagnosed, wrongly – I was close though). She watches in despair as two of the survivors seem to be going the same way. The other two have a reason for not being ill which did not sit well with the way I expected this book to go (and I never was entirely comfortable with it). For some reason I went into this expecting a Christian romance of some degree. And while the text was refreshingly free of Romance Novel Sexese™ (not a throbbing body part in sight), and while Rosa at least is nominally Christian, the characters are not chaste, nor do they behave in a particularly Christian manner. At all. Ever, really.
Rosa's husband is … well, I'm certainly not about to say she earned any of the treatment he gave her, but if she had entered into the marriage honestly and actually put her past behind her and applied herself (as teachers like to say), John might have had the foundation he needed to be a better man. Maybe not; his temper was formidable and maybe someday when she burned dinner he would have started hitting her. Regardless, as the book starts, she is terrified of him, and has good reason to be – and so I was surprised at the flashbacks that showed him controlling his anger and actually making the effort to be as good a husband as he could. Not, I want to be careful to state, that there is ever any valid excuse for a man to ever hit his wife – but it has to be said that Rosa treated him like a not-entirely-welcome houseguest because she was still in love with Lars, the man who fathered the child she gave birth to seven months after she married John … She lied to him, married him only to cover her pregnancy, and betrayed him, and he figured it all out; it doesn't take a psychologist to figure out why John was a bit put out. In other words, neither of them was innocent
I guess I'm not terribly fond of Rosa. Or Lars. Definitely not John, though I don't blame him for his anger – he's a horrible person when we meet him, and no amount of excuses will take that away.
A few of the minor characters were quite likeable and interesting – I would like the rest of the story of Elizabeth and the Triumph Ranch, for example, and in the Sonoma Valley there are some friends and neighbors I quite liked … Actually, I hate to say it, but I just realized that the histories of a great many of the minor characters here would make for a much more interesting reads than Rosa's story, at least once catastrophe strikes and Rosa takes the children and flees to, eventually, Sonoma. All resolution to the first half of the book happened off-stage – from the halfway point it was a whole new tale with almost no connection to the rest.
It may be odd to say it, but the problem I have with Sonoma Rose is that it's too much like a chunk out of reality: no one is blameless (except the children, and one of them is a brat while another is a little saint, both of which can be annoying extremes); events happen sometimes because of previous actions and sometimes just because they happen; people you want to like do things you can't like or in ways you can't like; and along the way a lot of loose ends are left flapping in the breeze.
I will credit this book for making me look deeper into Prohibition, because I had to do some digging in light of the predicament of the vineyards Rosa and Lars become involved with. Again, life-like, there are no answers; the story takes place pretty much smack in the middle of Prohibition (which was 1920-33, if you're wondering), and leaves off with absolutely no indication of whether the wineries manage to survive. It made a difference in my experience of the book to know – once I figured it out – that there were years yet to endure of Prohibition rather than, as I'd hoped, the end being in sight. (It also took far too much work just to figure out the really pretty important detail of exactly what year it was (1926 or 27, I believe, was the figure I wound up with): "Let's see, if that child was four when Prohibition began, and he's – hm, how old? Two years younger than this one who is seven, and if it all started in 1920, then …" (<- probably inaccurate recreation from memory)).
I disliked the choices made by Rosa as the second half developed (for one thing, as Lars himself points out, an alcoholic living at a winery can't be a good idea), and I disliked the manner in which some of the choices were followed through; there was a level of carelessness about the main characters' safety and minor characters' feelings that didn't fit with how I thought I was supposed to see Rosa and Lars. I just didn't like them. It is life-like – but that does not make it a well-told or enjoyable story.
Sonoma Rose is listed as part of the Elm Creek Quilts series. I'm not entirely sure what this means, apart from an assumption that the heroines of all the books will be quilters; from what I see on Jennifer Chiaverini's site there seem to be several present-day novels set around a shop with the same name as the series. How this book ties in, I have no idea. This concentration on a craft worried me a little, actually, because this sort of theme is so often so badly done – but the quilting, while not the star of the book, was an organic part of it, a tie between Rosa and her mother and then between Rosa and her children. The quilts are the natural symbols of home and warmth and comfort, but the concept is not beaten into the ground, happily … though puzzlingly, considering the series title. The book didn't exactly make me want to rush out and buy fat quarters and batting, and I learned nothing about quilting in the course of the read (and there were no patterns, which is almost unusual nowadays) … but I definitely don't need another hobby, and a lack of instruction is a very small price to pay for the lack of Cute. I don't think there's a syllable of Cute in here, even in the children's scenes.
The writing was a little stiff, but not terribly so; I wasn't enamored of the style, but it wasn't actively off-putting. There was a distance kept between what was happening on the page and me, the reader, so that I never was moved by the sufferings of the family, nor gladdened by their successes. Rosa's history is told in strategically placed flashbacks, but unfortunately there is no mechanism to alert the reader that what follows is or is not a flashback, so there were a few times when I'd come to a screeching halt as I tried to reconcile the appearance of a character I knew to be, in the book's present, dead. Characterization felt a little shallow, and a lot inconsistent – some of those decisions I mentioned earlier seemed completely out of the blue, or somehow off. But, still and all, while I obviously found a lot to criticize, I didn't hate it; there are stories in there somewhere, and I'd be willing to give another of Jennifer Chiaverini's books another shot to see if it's more successful. Several seem to take place during the Civil War, which helps.
ricefun's review
4.0
While I enjoyed the story of this book, and feel that Chiaverini explored this new era of prohibition and community of Sonoma Valley wine makers well in the book, I was disappointed by the lack of quilts or quilting in the novel. The connection to any Elm Creek Quilt story was a bare thread. My favorite Chiaverini storylines center around the relationships and history built through quiltmaking. Beyond that, the story itself is fine.
kairosdreaming's review
2.0
I've read all the Elm Creek Quilt books, in order. That being said, it isn't necessary to do that when reading this book. I'm not actually sure why this one is tagged as an Elm Creek Quilts novel at all. Except for a slight relation to one of the other characters, which wasn't even presented as important, this book was so far from an Elm Creek Quilts novel to be considered one at all.
Rose (aka Rosa) has always been in love with Lars. But because of his drinking and other issues that arise with their relationship, she ended up married to John instead. John is an abuser, and father to six of her eight children (and not all those children alive) and so he lashes out in his anger at her betrayal as well. When he becomes too dangerous, Rosa and her remaining four children run away with Lars. This is partly to save her, but also to try to help her children that have a mysterious sickness get better. They end up in wine country, and learn just how Prohibition is destroying the grape farmers there and become a part of more than they would have bargained for.
I just didn't really like Rosa. She was a victim of abuse, and I feel for her on that aspect, as noone should ever be abused, but I also didn't like the way that she treated people. She was unfair to her husband even before he became an abuser and while he was a horrible man for being an abuser, one wrong does not deserve another. Lars was also kind of lackluster for me, he didn't seem to care about too much and rather let his whims carry him for most of his life. The kids were all kind of secondary, you never really got a big feel for their personalities other than a few of them were sick and Rosa worried about them dying. There just wasn't anyone to connect to in this novel.
I thought the Prohibition theme was interesting but the way Chiaverini wrote it was long and drawn out. It actually took up the biggest part of the book aside from Rosa's love triangle. And there was barely any mention of quilts at all, which since this is an Elm Creek Quilts novel, is inexcusable. It's fine to write a book like this, but don't market it under that brand if that's not what it's about. I also found Rosa and Lars escape very unrealistic. Everything was just kind of handed to them and it was so easy for them to get what they wanted. Not to mention everything gets tied up neatly with a little bow at the end; things rarely work out that way in real life. She was so gritty and realistic in her descriptions of abuse and rape, that it really surprised me she would fall out of reality for everything else.
A disappointment for me. I wish it had been a stand alone book rather than marketed as an Elm Creek Quilt novel so I could have stayed away from it. I couldn't have even given it good marks then though due to the choppy fast pace and unrealistic happenings of the main characters.
Sonoma Rose
Copyright 2012
401 pages
Review by M. Reynard 2012
More of my reviews can be found at www.ifithaswords.blogspot.com
Rose (aka Rosa) has always been in love with Lars. But because of his drinking and other issues that arise with their relationship, she ended up married to John instead. John is an abuser, and father to six of her eight children (and not all those children alive) and so he lashes out in his anger at her betrayal as well. When he becomes too dangerous, Rosa and her remaining four children run away with Lars. This is partly to save her, but also to try to help her children that have a mysterious sickness get better. They end up in wine country, and learn just how Prohibition is destroying the grape farmers there and become a part of more than they would have bargained for.
I just didn't really like Rosa. She was a victim of abuse, and I feel for her on that aspect, as noone should ever be abused, but I also didn't like the way that she treated people. She was unfair to her husband even before he became an abuser and while he was a horrible man for being an abuser, one wrong does not deserve another. Lars was also kind of lackluster for me, he didn't seem to care about too much and rather let his whims carry him for most of his life. The kids were all kind of secondary, you never really got a big feel for their personalities other than a few of them were sick and Rosa worried about them dying. There just wasn't anyone to connect to in this novel.
I thought the Prohibition theme was interesting but the way Chiaverini wrote it was long and drawn out. It actually took up the biggest part of the book aside from Rosa's love triangle. And there was barely any mention of quilts at all, which since this is an Elm Creek Quilts novel, is inexcusable. It's fine to write a book like this, but don't market it under that brand if that's not what it's about. I also found Rosa and Lars escape very unrealistic. Everything was just kind of handed to them and it was so easy for them to get what they wanted. Not to mention everything gets tied up neatly with a little bow at the end; things rarely work out that way in real life. She was so gritty and realistic in her descriptions of abuse and rape, that it really surprised me she would fall out of reality for everything else.
A disappointment for me. I wish it had been a stand alone book rather than marketed as an Elm Creek Quilt novel so I could have stayed away from it. I couldn't have even given it good marks then though due to the choppy fast pace and unrealistic happenings of the main characters.
Sonoma Rose
Copyright 2012
401 pages
Review by M. Reynard 2012
More of my reviews can be found at www.ifithaswords.blogspot.com
jlmreader's review
3.0
I found this much more interesting than I expected, with the characters strugging with real issues and good historical background.
triciawil's review
3.0
I didn't love this one; I kept trying to compare the parallel storyline with that of A Quilter's Homecoming and struggled.
loquitacass's review
5.0
A lovely delve into history. Well researched and rich with the reality that sometimes you make choices that continue to haunt you. Unlike some of the other Elm Creek books, this one does not allow for happiness without significant payment.