Awesome story. The Rose with Thorns is Gal...it's also Riley. The care and handling of Gal and Riley is much like caring and handling roses with thorns. You don't want to get pricked, so you handle with care. But the Rose is outspoken and temperamental.But the power of love does indeed redeem. Gal, the prickly Rose, learns to love by by cutting some slack. The reader sees Gal soften, accept the failures of others, and allow others to come in to her life. Young Riley learns to trust...eventually to trust the mother who has consistently let her down.A wonderful story with interesting details on the intricacies of rose breeding. Galilee Garner, the narrator of Margaret Dilloway’s novel The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns, is a complex individual. Named by her parents after a “hippie” trip to the Holy Land in the 1970s, she prefers to go by Gal. She is a high school biology teacher in her mid-thirties who has suffered from kidney failure since she was a child. In her spare time, she breeds roses, hoping to create a new rose that will win prizes and be sold to the consumer market.The book’s title is a little heavy handed; okay, we get it, Gal is as prickly as the thorny roses she breeds. But she is worth getting to know. I liked that the book’s narrator is herself somewhat unlikeable. She felt more believable because of her difficult personality traits. She lives a rigid life – she has to, because of her kidney failure – which causes issues with her best friend and with the principal at her school.Gal has a sister Becky. Becky has always been spacey, irresponsible, and a user of drugs and alcohol. She has been a neglectful mother to her one child, Riley, and soon after the book begins Riley arrives unannounced at Gal’s school. Becky’s job is sending her to Hong Kong for several months, so she has sent her daughter to live with Gal. Now, in addition to work, kidney dialysis, and rose breeding, Gal is thrust into the role of Riley’s guardian.I enjoyed the relationship between Gal and Riley and found it quite believable. The information about undergoing kidney dialysis and breeding roses seemed well researched. Even Becky, who is unsympathetic in many ways, is well rounded as we come to understand how difficult it was for her growing up, competing for her parents’ attention with her sick sister Gal.I thought a possible romance for Gal was superfluous but aside from that I found the plot interesting and credible. I wanted to know what happened next. I like a book without a neat, tidy ending, and this book’s ending was satisfactory without everything wrapping up perfectly for Gal. If you are a gardener or someone who enjoys novels about interesting characters and family relationships, you might enjoy Margaret Dilloway’s The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns. I chose this as a discussion title for my library book club, and we had an excellent discussion.
Do You like book Sztuka Uprawiania Róż Z Kolcami (2013)?
A little boring. I read the beginning and then skipped through the pages.
—steph11
Family dynamics are complicated and redemption is possible. A good read.
—Katie
I hated the main character until the last quarter of the book.
—Edgar
