Customer Reviews

The Crystal Rose

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What has happened to Brandewyne? She used to write rich passionate romances that turned the reader on. The Crystal Rose is a sad attempt at bringing back her art. I don't understand what happened. And where are the love scenes? They kiss and fade to black...then nothing! This is nothing compared to what she used to write. And Hugo is so boring. What happened to her deep brooding heroes who were scarred and afraid to love? Hugo is so thin he waves in the wind.

She seems to be attempting to write something Dickensian with the 1850s setting, but it doesn't work. Plus the plot to kill Queen Victoria is just thrown in. Why not focus on Hugo having to prove who he is? And the claim that Victoria was seriously concerned with social reform is totally bogus!

All together this book was a disappointment. I miss the old Brandewyne. Some of her heroes were too abusive, but at least they had more dimensions. And the heroines had more depth. Oh, the eighties...

I've been a long time fan of Ms. Brandewyne's novels and I've read them all. Her latest offering, The Crystal Rose, reads like a young adult historical novel. It's an interesting enough premise, youngsters Rose and Hugo are separated by a tragedy in Hugo's family. They meet many years later (1850 London) and quickly find themselves invovled in political intrigue. There was more romance (ala young adult) in The Crystal Rose than the last Brandewyne novel, The Ninefold Key (it was a historical novel with a dash of romance thrown in), but as much as I liked the Crystal Rose I was also disappointed that the dark, passionate and sexual intensity that has been Ms. Brandewyne's trademark was TOTALLY absent in this book. The main characters were pale imitations of previous wonderful Brandewyne creations and I am sad to see this happen. Ms. Brandewyne has been writing for many years and she has a right to change her style, but from the past few books she has had published, I feel her heart isn't in writing extremely sensual novels any more. That's too bad, because at her peak, she was the best in the business and that's how she made a name for herself.

If you like historical novels with an old-fashioned, formulatic G-rated romance then you will enjoy The Crystal Rose. If, like me, you miss the passionate, larger than life characters of Ms. Brandewyne's previous works, reread some of her backlist titles.

I really wanted to like this book but I was unable to make a connection with the cardboard characters. There was little to no emotional, or sexual tension between Rose and Hugo. The worst part of the book were the research dumps interspersed throughout the book. There is a fascinating paragraph about the history of Mayfair, and many others like it, but they were completely out of place, pointless and disrupted any flow of the story.
I recommend that you pass on this one.

The hearts of long-time fans of Rebecca Brandewyne may squeeze painfully in their chests as they recall the smoldering intensity of Wolf and Storm, and the grand passion of Hunter and Mary. But fans will be severely disappointed with...um...oh gosh, what're their names again? Rose and Hugo, the main characters in Crystal Rose, have less emotional depth than a set of tightly-laced Victorian paper dolls. (Surely even the formal Victorians didn't use such relentlessly stilted dialogue!) Having firmly established our heroine as a prim and proper ideal of Victorian womanhood, it's a bit jarring when a chapter near the end of the book ends with Rose (finally!) kissing Hugo...and the first sentence of the next chapter begins with the two of them "basking" in bed (modestly skipping all of the in-between bits). Even if we could bring ourselves to care about any of the cliched characters (Rose's parents and sisters, for instance, are pale imitations of the Bennett family, and the villains were overblown to the point of being laughable), the book is so larded with superfluous and condescending exposition that it's literally annoying to read. (Yes, we all *know* who Queen Victoria was, and we don't *need* to know how many panes of glass or floorboards were in the Crystal Palace.) The ponderous plot claws its way slowly and painfully forward through a series of stiff, shallow, and often abrupt scenes, making this a real test of determination to wade through. With chapter titles like "The Rescue," there is absolutely zero tension, sexual or otherwise.

This book is so disappointing and so oddly unlike Ms. Brandewyne's earlier work that I literally double-checked Amazon.com to make sure I hadn't made some mistake and bought something by someone else. The whole experience reminded me of listening to my kid sister play with her paper dolls when she was a child. (Only her plots were better, her dialogue was wittier, and her dolls were more likable.)

In 1835 Delhi, India, Lord Thornleigh's haveli (home) is on fire. Young Rose Windermere watches the blaze from her window next door and worries that her best friend thirteen year old Hugo Drayton, Thornleigh's son, will die in the inferno. Rose and her family survive the conflagration while the Thornleigh brood including Hugo is assumed to be all dead. A sad Rose believes that her pal survived because she knows she would somehow feel a loss inside if he died. Her family returns to England soon after the fiery debacle while Hugo lives in hiding saved by his man-servant Mayur Singh though his parents were murdered in the fire as a cover-up.

Years later in Covent Garden, a stranger slips a letter into the hand of Rose that says very little that makes sense to her. However, when she meets an Indian businessman, Rose feels she knows him from most likely her time in the subcontinent. She goes with her gut and soon encounters Hugo alive and well with a plan to expose his odious cousin as an avaricious murderer of his uncle and aunt in India over fifteen years ago and now is involved in a conspiracy against the throne.

This is an exhilarating Victorian romantic suspense that grips the audience with the vivid opening sequence in which the reader sees the fire through the eyes of Rose. The story line contains several twists afterward though seems a bit over the edge with the unneeded threat to Queen Victoria, as Hugo has enough on his plate to prove his relative is a cold blooded killer and the show he loves his childhood sweetheart with an adult love. Historical romance readers will enjoy Rebecca Brandewyne's fine thriller.

Harriet Klausner