SERENA.

SERENA by RON RASH

George and Sabrina Pemberton arrive in the wilds at the North Carolina mountains to build a life together. Unlike any other woman the timber empire has ever seen, Serena oversees crews, hunts rattlesnakes and even saves her husband's life. But when Serena learns she will never bear a child, it sets in motion a course of events that will change the lives of everyone in the community.
...... Outer back cover.

FIRST SENTENCE: When Pemberton returned to the north Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father's estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton's child.

MEMORABLE MOMENT: An unlidded pine coffin leaned against the commissary's back wall, the deceased propped up inside. A placard bearing the words Rest In Peace had been placed on the coffin's squared head, but the corpse's tight-shouldered rigidity belied the notion, as if even in death Ledbetter anticipated another falling tree.

KEEP IT OR NOT?: A reading group book I shall be returning this and have no intention of buying a copy.A novel in which some of the characters actually existed though they are fictional representations, I would love to know how much truth there is in the telling of the story.

Not too sure what I made of this book if I'm being totally honest. Not a badly written story, it just wasn't a book for me.

'A story of passion and revenge ..... There has never been a heroine quite like this.' claimed The Times on the front cover.

Hmm, not too sure I would agree with this statement. Sad to say I just didn't get any sense of passion - not between husband and wife Serena and George Pemberton who seemed to share a love that was more obsessive than anything else and nor when it came down to 'passion' being the determining factor in the events that were to take place which, to me were, largely, too calculated to be passionate.

As for the heroine? I'm not too sure to which of the two characters The Times refers as neither Serena nor Rachel lived up to my idea of a heroine, the first being too cold and ruthless (dare I say verging on the psychopathic?) and the latter being, though a protective mother, somewhat a 'wet blanket'.

Actually it is probably the characters I have the most difficulty with as I'm one of those readers who generally speaking will put up with a poor plot if I 'like' the characters which I didn't as, with the author having very clearly defined ideas of just who the 'goodies' and the 'baddies' were, there was no 'middle ground' which led to fairly one dimensional people.

Too slow and plodding for my tastes, this novel took a long time to say little and was predictable in the extreme though to be fair there was a twist at the end which I wasn't expecting and almost missed as I felt the story had ended with chapter thirty seven only to discover that there was in fact a 'chapter thirty eight' though it was not labelled as such and almost seemed to have been added as an afterthought - an afterthought that though not expected seemed a little ludicrous.

Set in the late 1920's during the time of the 'Great Depression' I did think that this angle of the story was covered well and that you got a real feel of just what  hard times times they were. Also wonderfully captured was the somewhat 'gallows humour' of the loggers which I really delighted in as I did the glorious descriptions of the landscape.

The 24th book read for my 100+ Reading Challenge, this was a reading group read.