Book Review: My Dearest Rose by Jessie McClain

Summary: My Dearest Rose is a fictional drama based off the life of a 24 year old girl named Iris. Iris lives in the small town of Falls City Oregon where she works at a small shop and plays music on the side at a local coffeeshop. She raises her 3 year old brother and is on bad terms with her mom, whom she has never been able to get along with. Her boyfriend (who was also her best friend) had died 4 years earlier and she is still haunted by the memory. She then meets a guy named Jason (who is a roamer from Georgia) as she is performing one day at the coffeeshop and the story evolves. There are many twists and turns in the book. It's based on someones life that could be mine, your own, or a strangers. It shows that when you think there is nothing or no one left to save you, that your true salvation can come fromt he most unexpected place and that sometimes all is takes is a stranger. When all hope is lost who is it that you cling to?

Review: I really really wanted to like this book more but I just didn't. I felt like there were too many unnecessary scenes and events that happened so the reader had a hard time connecting with the story. The first 100 pages of the book flew by so fast that I think if the author had just focused on that part of the story, it could have made up the entire novel. But instead she chose to focus on 2 years of Iris and Jason's relationship, which just made the story seem to drag on. I liked Jason and Iris's characters and how in love they were with each other, but some things that happened to them weren't all that believable. The letter Iris's mom wrote to her didn't really make sense and I feel like it was just there to wrap up Iris's relationship with her mother in a nice, neat package that fit with the perfect ending. The reasoning behind the title is really cute along with how Iris and Jason fell in love, but other than that everything was just kind of shoved into a love story. My Dearest Rose is enjoyable enough to read, but it's not the first book I would pick off of the shelf.