Reviews for A Blood Red Rose

The average rating for A Blood Red Rose based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-20 00:00:00 Diane Lim I just loved the first third or so of this book. It's a historical novel set in Boston during the 1770s and is told as an epistolary novel, alternating between the male protagonist, a painter, and the female protagonist, the painter's apprentice, who is a fallen-from-society woman pretending to be a boy so that she can work. It's full of witty banter and the authors are American history professors, so it also felt as if the settings and descriptions and dialogue were real. Just wonderful. And then the sex scenes started in, which would be fine with me if they were occasional and brief and meant to advance the plot, but these were of what I think of as the how-to-manual variety, as if we are all very interested in who does what to whom in what way for pages at a time. Plus some detailed sexual harassment and abuse, which is never fun to read. And if that weren't enough, the authors had to throw in a completely unnecessary *murder* which had to be solved at great length and in detail even though the villain was obvious from the get-go. I finished the book, hoping it would get back on track with the history and banter, but skipped and yawned a lot. Too bad.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-28 00:00:00 Nigel Walters I think the authors were trying to make a nod at novel conventions, so I can overlook the trite mystery and romance aspects of it. As a few other people mentioned, the sex scenes seem out of place and a bit overboard, but what really got me was the way Fanny's reveal as a woman became such a big deal. She immediately starts wearing women's clothes around the house, and acting the lady somehow even though she has more than proven that such roles are based on nothing, and her romance with Jameson turns into a triumph of heterosexuality over his homosexual pining for Weston and his previous relationship with Ignatius. His preference for a "man's mind in a woman's body" couldn't help but resonate with me as somewhat heterosexist. Even though the characters are supposed to be of their own time, Jameson has already established himself as having had passionate same-sex affairs in the past, so his changing preferences seem to be a value judgment that hits too closely to the era the authors live in. Additionally, while it tries, perhaps too hard, to portray African Americans in a sensitive way, it ends up exalting them in a way that feels a lot like anxious racial guilt. The book is clearly written by white people for white people. We're meant to be moved and captivated in the one scene that features more than one black person, which is a midnight burial, complete with musicality and spirituality. Then the rest of the book Ignatius goes back to being Sherlock Holmes. Gag.