Rating: 
Summary: Rose: An Engineer's Review
Review: What is a novel? The easy definition is: "a story that takes you somewhere and teaches you something about human experience." A lot of books do this. Travel books and our grammar school history books do. Tom Clancy books do. Even cookbooks can. But to be a really good novel, a book should teach something factual and unique, and do it with a lot of pleasure for the reader. Take you there and pay you for going. Martin Cruz Smith is my choice for master of painless, fun learning, and this book is a perfect example of his art.Rose is set in the English coal-producing town of Wigan in the 1870's. The intricate mystery of what happened to a young clergyman who suddenly disappeared takes and holds our attention, while the background of the story gives us the sound and grit and blackness of the coal mining life. Being an old engineer myself, I especially appreciate the author's impeccable easy-flowing explanations of how and why things were. (Why do the coal miners have so many blue scars on their forheads? Why should you never run carrying a lit coal-miner's lamp?) The common man worked very very hard in previous centuries. From sailors on wooden ships to the subsistance farmers and fishermen: life was damned hard. Coal miners were some of the hardest working of people anywhere. It is a puzzle why the enormous gulf between these incredibly tough common people and their imperious rulers, the upper classes, never caused a revolution like that in France or Russia. Feeling myself almost participating in this work made me marvel at my luck for my present condition, as well as feel a little shamed to think I could never have been able to do what those men and women did. We really are such wimps, nowadays. Hooray for us, I guess. Rose herself, the namesake of the book, turns out to be the kind of woman that many of us poor males would almost die to have, and we urge our reluctant and imperfect hero Jonathan Blair onward to solve the mystery and get the girl. Yes, it sounds trite put in that way, but Mr. Smith's clean uncomplicated language slyly sucks you in before you notice it. This is one of those books that gets in the way of doing all those important dull jobs we face daily. If you have the idea that "purring" only has to do with cats, read Rose to discover what purring was a century ago in the coal fields of England.
Rating:
Summary: Victorian England Comes Alive
Review: Rose was an amazing book. I am a huge fan of the Rnko books and thought that Rose would be ok because of Cruz Smith. Victorian England never excited me as an era. Cruz Smith brings the characters life and Victorian England and its dula faces and lives were fascinating. This book was charming and suspenseful and kept you guessing until the end. I highly recommend Rose as both a thriller and historical fiction, Cruz Smith did wonderful work with the charcaters, suspense and background.
Rating:
Summary: At Least Two Characters Worth Noting
Review: I have read this book several times and I still can not figure out who the central character is - the engineer(narrator)or Rose. That is not a fault; it is a plus. The details of description are wonderful. I can feel the grit beneath my feet and the grit on my face. I can almost smell the town of Wigan. And Rose has "grit!" While it has a "happy" ending, it is not a "happy" story. "Was England build-ed here; Among these dark, Satanic mills?"
Rating:
Summary: Cruz Smith's Best Ever
Review: As a Cruz Smith fan who has appreciated the stunning clarity of his images and the realism of his present day locales, I approached Rose with care. Set 100-plus years ago in a place as foreign to Cruz-Smith's Moscow as you can imagine, Rose's story unfolds in the nineteenth-century coalmining town of Wigan, Lancashire. Well, you can only applaud. The grit, dirt, and rough brutality of the life are all there in their expected brilliance, like stones on the bed of a mountain stream. The story - the hunt for a missing man, and the unexpected, enigmatic, unwanted romance that intervenes - develops with moments of sudden violence and erotic passion that catch the reader unawares and fascinated. It's well-paced, beautifully written, and the scenes below ground in the low-technology coal-pit of 100 years ago, with explosive gas, roof cave-ins, and strength-sapping heat, are just about the best Cruz Smith has done. On the third reading in as many weeks I kept finding new depth and artistry in a novel that gave me more enjoyment and frankly, awe at the accomplishment, than anything I have read in years.
Rating:
Summary: A wounded hero and an enigmatic heroine in Victorian England
Review: The book Rose most reminded me of is John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. Both have troubled heroes and enigmatic heroines, both are set in Victorian England, although Rose's coal-mining town is horrific, and the southern England seacoast settings in FLW are near-idyllic. Smith is a master of clever plotting; he plants red herrings everywhere to lead the reader astray. What IS really going on here! You won't know until the very end, but, along the way, you'll get a quick education in British imperialist/industrialist history and a rare love story. Highly recommended. You know the phrase, "I couldn't put this down"? You will understand it better after you start reading this little gem of good writing.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book!
Review: This book was really great - almost to the end I did not really know what was going on. A great story, interesting setting, good character development. I look forward to read it again in 2 years (yes, I do have a bad memory).
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful characters and setting; unconvincing story
Review: This book exhibits great strengths but suffers from a story line that is ultimately unconvincing. The strengths are in the author's presentation of characters - especially the main character, Jonathan Blair, an expat who feels more at home in primitive Africa than civilized England and a character who could have stepped from the pages of a Graham Greene novel, and the setting, Wigam, a coal mining town in rural England which is a veritable soot filled earthly hell. Our tour through this seldom portrayed aspect of Victorian England is grimly fascinating and the author's descriptive powers are such that every scene is vividly clear in the mind's eye. What is not successful, however, is the plot. The initial premise is interesting, but the follow through leaves a lot to be desired. Many significant moments in the story are simply unbelievable (disquise and mistaken identity are creaky plot devices, especially when the parties involved are lovers)and the final resolution of the mystery was, for me anyway, a let down. Still, I give this book four stars because it was such fun to read just from the point of view of experiencing something completly different. If the story had been as believable as the description of place and character it would have been an excellent, rather than simply good, book.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Place, Another Time
Review: I always enjoy a book that takes me to another place and another time, somewhere I've never been or can never go. Smith's Rose is like that, taking us to Victorian Wales--but not the warm fuzzy Wales of Dylan Thomas. This land is every bit as gritty as London's Whitechapel. In this morass of dirty coal fields and hard luck lives Smith's hero, Jonathan Blair, finds a flower in the form of a female coalworker/prostitute who is named Rose. She is enigmatic, and Blair keeps getting sidetracked from his mission to find a missing cleric. Blair, like Smith's other heroes is just short of being truly competent, having to rely on such crusts of information and make- shift deductions as he can, while suffering slanders to his abilities and the inevitable blows to the head. Smith's work always manage to transcend whatever genre in which he is writing, and Rose is no exception. Let a fine storyteller take you to Victorian Wigan, but be sure to duck. It's a dangerous place.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Very rich characters. Mr. Smith's best book
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but for the ending
Review: The book is definitely Smith's best. Rich detail of a period of time and location not much known to me -- on top of a great mystery -- made the story that much more enjoyable. I hope Smith will consider writing a book about the exploits of the hero in Africa; there were some hints of some possible strong stories in this book. Unforunately, the ending was not up to the quality of the rest of the book, but a great read otherwise.
| 
