Product Description

Sally and Fred's Norfolk Broads boating holiday lurches from one mishap to another, until they befriend 15-year old Rosie. After she has a fight with her violent mother, it is Sally and Fred she runs to. She goes to live with her grandmother, but through the years she relies on Sally and Fred.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128728 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 284 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
While lamenting her passing, it was a cause for much celebration among admirers of Catherine Cookson that there were to be nine posthumous novels. While it's clear that these books would have been different had she lived to revise them, there is no question that the latest, Rosie of the River, is a highly accomplished and involving piece of work. All the skill at sympathetic characterisation and beguiling plotting that made her the world's most successful writer of romantic fiction is here aplenty.

Sally Carpenter, worried by her husband Fred's suggestion that they should undertake a boating trip on the Norfolk Broads, is reluctantly persuaded, and the couple set off with their bull terrier Bill in their boat, Dogfish Three. Sally was right to be worried: lying in wait for them is a catalogue of disasters that make the holiday a fraught experience. All is redeemed, though, when they are befriended by the boating fraternity and come into contact with 15-year-old Rosie, whose chequered family history quickly has them involved with her problems. The couple decides to help Rosie in her attempts to improve her lot, and then have to come to terms with Rosie falling in love.

In many ways, this is something of a departure for Cookson, with centre stage being claimed by the resilient boating couple Sally and Fred (although Rosie becomes a central character who is realised quite as fully as the older characters), and if the travails of the couple have a striking ring of authenticity, that is no doubt because Cookson utilised her own experience of boating on the Norfolk Broads with her husband Tom to create the background for her charming tale. This time, the suffering that her heroines are usually forced to endure is underplayed in favour of a narrative that makes its effects gently (but as persuasively as one could wish). The eponymous Rosie is a delightful character (as, amusingly, is Bill, the terrier), and the narrative keeps us inexorably turning the pages:

The river had widened and looked bleak and forbidding; posts, black and dripping green slime, reared up out of the rain-spangled water, which no longer appeared like a river: its width spoke of the sea. She went and stood by her husband, and he, taking his eyes from the windscreen, smiled at her. However, she did not return the smile for there, ahead, forever ahead it seemed, were posts.

Review
'The most celebrated historical novelist of our time' The Times. 'The undisputed queen of Popular Fiction' Daily Mail.

From the Back Cover
Sally Carpenter can't swim and doesn't like boats, so when her husband Fred announces that he has booked them a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads she's far from enthusiastic.

Together with their beloved bull-terrier Bill they set off, only to lurch from one mishap to another. Drowning their sorrows in a local pub one evening they meet Rosie, whose family is also boating on the Broads. The Carpenters befriend fifteen-year-old Rosie and when she has a fight with her violent mother it is to Fred and Sally that she runs.

After the holiday, Rosie goes to live with her grandmother, but through the years that follow she relies on Fred and Sally whenever she is in trouble. They help her sort out the many and varied difficulties facing her in her new life, and come to look upon her as the daughter they never had.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing for an avid Cookson fan
I struggled with this book as it involved too many people by 'hearsay' - people the Carpenters hadnt even met. I found the story line weak and would have prefered a more indepth story around the boating trip. Not a fine finish to the immense catalogue of wonderful stories by Catherine Cookson.

You really feel part of the action !!
I really enjoyed this book as having been on a narrow boat holiday day myself, I can appreciate everything that happened to the Carpenters. It was funny in parts as well as the serious side of the story. The way they took Rosie into their hearts was wonderfully Christian !!! Another briiliant book by Catherine Cookson.

M.Bradley

all boat lovers will enjoy this book.
A lighthearted tale about a couple who believe they know all there is to know about each other. Their world is suddenly turned on its head when they take a holiday on a Norfolk Broads cabin cruiser. All boat lovers will empathise with the trial and tribulations that befall the maiden voyage of this lovely couple as they discover not only boating but themselves.