The Rose of Sebastopol

The Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon

      I’m not quite sure how I feel about this book. I mean it’s a book and the characters are lovely and well written. The main character is a mousy young woman during the Crimean war who goes off to the war zone find and nurse her betrothed back to health. Eventually, in his delirium, this man convinces her to enter the war zone find her missing favorite cousin who was a nurse in his hospital. This heroine, who wants nothing more to stay at home and have a nice domestic life, finds bravery and does what needs to be done to find the people she cares about.

    As I read, it became apparent that this author really knows her time period and the geography and how people thought. However, she has an unfortunate habit. She is way too fond of flashbacks and I do mean way, way too fond of flashbacks. In the first hundred pages, there was something like thirty two chapters. Most of which were only a page and a half jumping through three different times in the characters’ lives; childhood, the present (during the search for the cousin), and a year before (how everyone ended up involved in the war). This would not have been so bad except she would switch time periods as soon as the story started getting good in the one that was currently being read. If she had put the book in chronological order, it would’ve been brilliant.

     As it is, the ending is good and there are some twists and turns that make it worth while read. I could’ve done with out the final chapter which was another page and a half flashback but that’s just me. If you like historical novels or just have a couple of days to read something new, it’s worth putting up with the frustration of the flashbacks and getting it from the library but I don’t think I’d read it twice.