Book Review - Where Rainbows End (Cecelia Ahern)

Plot Summary

Rosie and Alex meet on their first day of primary school when they are forced to sit together.

The story starts when Alex invited Rosie to his seventh birthday party via a note in class. The school years are told through the passing of notes during lessons, letters home from the teacher, Miss Big Nose Smelly Breath Casey, e-mails and IM.

In the final few years of school, Alex's dad takes up a job in Boston, and so the family move out there. Alex and Rosie don't want to be separated, so Alex and Rosie beg their parents for Alex to be allowed to stay with Rosie and her family. But Alex's parents want him to move to Boston with them. Rosie plans to go to university in Boston with Alex; Rosie to study hotel management and Alex to study medicine.

Alex promises to make it home for her end of school dance, but, after a delay at the airport, he doesn't make it, and Rosie ends up going with Brian, a kid they both hated in school.

Rosie's plans must change, for she discovers she is pregnant, and is unable to take up her place studying in Boston.

Rosie has a baby daughter, Katie, and she struggles to look after her. She feels she is too young to be a mum. All her friends are off out having a good time, and she is at home with her baby.

Alex becomes the god-father to Katie, and comes home for the christening.

Rosie gets a job working in a paperclip factory, where she meets Ruby. She and Ruby become good friends. They start learning salsa together, and, eventually, Ruby and her son Gary start entering salsa competitions. Ruby's boyfriend, a beer drinking man of few words, thinks this makes Gary a bit feminine.

Rosie later leaves the job and starts working in a hotel, which is her dream job.

Eventually, Alex marries a girl in his class. Rosie and Katie attend the wedding, and Rosie is Alex's best man, Katie is the bridesmaid.

Rosie meets and marries a bank manager. Alex attends the wedding. Meanwhile, he has divorced his wife, left Rosie a love letter which she doesn't receive, and later meets a girl he used to fancy, and they marry.

Rosies' bosses, the two Mr Lakes, offer her a promotion, but she would have to move to another area of Ireland. She wants to accept it, but neither her husband nor Katie do. Katie and her best friend, Toby, don't want to be split up, and on discovering Rosie will not let Katie move in with Toby and his family, the pair of them decided to run away together.

Rosie's husband cheats on her. Kevin (her brother - she got him a job in the kitchen of one of the other Two Lakes Hotels in ireland) informs her that he has booked them in for a weekend. But he discovers that her husband is actually there with another woman. Kevin punches him on the nose.

Rosie goes to a pub to drown her sorrows, and ends up telling these two very nice men with a very distinguishable tattoo on their forearm, about her bank manager husband who is cheating on her. They drop her home. Later, she reads in the papers about two men with a very distinguishable tattoo on their forearm who have beaten her husband up and robbed some of the money. She discovers some wrapped in an envelope on her kitchen table and decides to go visit Alex.

Katie's father turns up during her early teens, and he becomes involved in her life once more.

Rosie takes on a new job, working for Miss Big Nose Smelly Breath Casey, whilst finally studying hotel management. Just before her final exams, her father has a heart attack and dies, and Rosie is about to give up her course (she will have to repeat the entire course, not just the final year). But between Miss Big Nose Smelly Breath Casey (who is now actually friends with Rosie and delays her retirement to actually see Rosie achieve her ambition) threatening to fire her if she doesn't go back, and a letter she receives from her father which he wrote the day before he suffered his heart attack saying how pleased he was with both Rosie and Katie, she decides to complete her course.

Rosie gets a job as a hotel manager, but the hotel is shut down.

Alex gets divorced yet again.

Katie follows her ambition to become a DJ in the club her dad runs in Ibiza. Toby trains as a dentist (he was obsessed with going to the dentist with Katie when she had braces).

When Rosie mum dies, she inherits the house and decides to run it as a B&B.

In the final chapter of the book, when Rosie is about 50, she is sitting on the floor of one of the rooms, reading through all the letters, e-mails and notes she has received throughout her life.

And then Alex turns up at the door.

Book Review

This is not a book I have read recently, but it is my absolute favourite book of all time, and I have read it many times. It always makes me cry, from about half way through the book (about when Rosie dad dies), right up until the end (I'm even typing this now with tears streaming down my cheeks).

It's a mixture of the sadness and the time wasted (Alex only much later tells Rosie that the reason she banged her head when out for her sixteenth birthday was because she was leaning over on her bar stool to kiss him), for they have both loved each other for many years, but something, whether it be moving to Boston, finding out she is pregnant with Brian the Whine's baby, or being married to people that they don't truly love, that always keeps them apart. It is the fact that they have always been best friends, they have always been there for one another and they know that the other's partner is not right for them.

Their love is obvious to everyone (both Alex's ex-wives, Rosie's ex-husband, their parents and their siblings), but neither of them can see it.

The fact that the whole book is written through letters, emails, texts etc means that you grow with the characters, from the really badly written notes of a six year old, to the proper letters and emails of the adults, and this allows a great bond to form between the characters and the reader.

The only part of the book not written in this form is the very, very end, the last few pages, which makes Alex and Rosie's meeting here seem extra special.

Cecelia Ahern is a wonderful author. I love all her books and am looking forward to the release of the next one, whenever that shall be.