Reviews for War of the Rosens

The average rating for War of the Rosens based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-14 00:00:00 Derek Cheung Melodrama. Soppy, over the top melodrama. Simply written and readable, but such well covered ground by others that it's hard not to feel like this is all a cliché. A coming of age story in New York. A sick sister. A cruel father. Clearly this is some kind of memoir, disguised as a novel. Doing that weakens it. Why not call it a memoir, and make it stronger? If it's a novel, why not take some grander twists and turns? Throw some deeper oddity into it. Being neither memoir nor novel, it just sort of happens, playing itself out. I picked up this book because of reading essays and short stories by this author. They were a little more experimental and wild. So to pick up this book and have such a straightforward plot is a bit of a disappointment. It's not a bad book, it's just too simple and began to feel like a chore to read. And I get this weird feeling that the author somehow took her own childhood and tried to make it "better". Put a bow on it. There. I fixed it. I strongly suspect the bow fell off a few months later.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-02-28 00:00:00 Joshua harbin This novel, like "The Believers," deals with a dysfunctional American Jewish families whose parents are committed left-wing antireligious atheists, yet I enjoyed this one, "The War of the Rosens," much more. I think it's because although this story is sad in many ways, it's not mean-spirited (as "The Believers" seemed to me). It's not a great novel. I could criticize the pacing, & some of the characterizations. But it held my attention & I cared about what happened to the characters, to some extent. P.S. Goodreads has the wrong description on their site. Their one-sentence description is, "Historical novel based on the true story of a Dutch Jew who accompanies her six stepdaughters to Auschwitz during the Holocaust." Must've mixed this up with some other book! UPDATE: Goodreads has corrected the error.