"Love, Rosie"
Cecilia Ahern
Hyperion, $6.99 paperback ($22.95 hardback, as "Rosie Dunne")
Although I have read only two of her books, it is obvious to me that Cecilia Ahern is a master of the sweet, romantic novel. Following "PS, I Love You," Ahern's "Love, Rosie" (previously published as "Rosie Dunne") is another sweet, romantic novel. And like "PS, I Love You," the reader will find herself cheering for the heroine to pursue her dreams and be all that she can despite the hardships she is facing.
The story begins with 7-year-old Rosie Dunne and 7-year-old Alex Stewart and follows their lives for the next 40some years — through letters, e-mails, instant messages, chat rooms and text messages. Rosie and Alex are secretly in love with the other but refuse to admit it to anyone, especially each other. Their friends and family are just waiting for the two to get together, but in the mean time watch Rosie and Alex deal with marriages and children and education and jobs.
Ahern had a genius idea in writing the book through correspondence. Who doesn't like to snoop and read the conversations of others? The letters also provide her the ability to skip through long periods of time, leaving clues as to how much time has passed between correspondence with weddings, divorces, birthdays, births and deaths. The primary fault with this form of writing, however, is that it is difficult to explain everything important that has gone on through conversation only, so description of events seems forced at times, and during instant messages the characters tend to be long-winded.
The benefit of being long-winded is that the soliloquies provide Ahern an opportunity to be more poetic in her writing like in a normal novel instead of sticking solely to conversation:
You can run and run as fast and as far as you like but the truth is, wherever you run, there you are. (215)
The thickness of the book might be intimidating, but it is easy to make it through 100 pages in one sitting — again, probably because of the way the book is written.
With this being a sweet, romantic novel, the reader might start out believing Rosie and Alex are destined to be together and will come together in the final pages of the book. But the plot twists Ahern weaves throughout the story will leave the reader guessing whether things will ever work out for the best friends who obviously always have been in love.
