The Rose Petal Beach

by Dorothy Koomson

[Leah]

Dorothy Koomson is an author I adore. Her novels are so unique, that she’s pretty much set herself up in her own little genre of Chick Lit/Suspense novels. Her last couple of books have been beyond excellent, with The Ice Cream Girls even being made into a TV show for ITV, and she’s an author you just get so excited about. Her books are always so thrilling and full of suspense that it is so hard to put them down. So when I heard all about her new book, The Rose Petal Beach, I was sold, and it did not disappoint.

Tamia Challey has been happily married to Scott for what seems like forever. They have two kids, a nice house in Brighton, and Tamia has two of the best friends she could ask for in Mirabelle and Beatrix. Until one night, the police enter the Challey household and arrest Scott for doing something so terrible Tamia can’t even believe he would have done it. However, when the Challey’s lives takes a tragic twist, and more questions come out than answers, and no one is what they seem, Tamia’s life turns upside down and she doesn’t know where to run, who to believe, or whether she even knows what she herself is doing.

The Rose Petal Beach is perhaps Koomson’s most ambitious effort to date, what with so many double lives being held in one novel, and so much to be unravelled and so many different voices, boy is it a stonker. I don’t even know where to start. The novel is so full of information, that not one of the 500 or so pages feel like too many, that feel like you can pause for breath as more and more revelations are unearthed and uncovered. It’s like a rollercoaster that keeps climbing up and up and up and up, and just as you think you’ve reached the top and are about to topple back to Earth, it just keeps climbing and twisting. I found the entire novel so absorbing and thrilling and it was so horrible to have to go to work and leave the book.

I found myself thinking one thing before thinking another and the characters were perhaps the most complex and confusing and all. I never really felt I got a handle on any of the characters bar perhaps Tamia. Even when Tamia was doubting herself about things, and when she made realisations she wasn’t entirely innocent in everything that occurs, I just felt nothing but sad for her. She didn’t deserve everything that happened and she wasn’t a bad person, really. I never got a handle on Tamia’s husband Scott, in fact I just didn’t really like him, at all. At first I felt sorry for him, but it didn’t last very long, really. Beatrix, again, I liked her at first, but soon? Not so much. Mirabelle was perhaps the most complex of all, and it was a shame that she wasn’t in the novel as much as I’d have liked. However, she does seem to reverberate around the entire novel. I found the characters to be so complex, but that only made the novel better as the novel just kept throwing new things at you.

I thought The Rose Petal Beach was an excellent novel. There’s bits of the novel I’d like to discuss in more detail, but that would perhaps ruin it a little bit for you and this is a novel you should go into practically blind. It was very well written, and it jumps from perspective to perspective and it pretty much proves to us that we can hear one thing from a person, but that doesn’t mean they’re telling you the truth and I found it fascinating how one particular narrative proved that point. Koomson is just a master storyteller. She is one of the best writers around and although I didn’t particularly feel The Rose Petal Beach was as good as The Ice Cream Girls, it was still fabulous and I very much recommend it.