Veiled Rose by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

Veiled Rose by Anne Elisabeth Stengl. Bethany House, 2011. 394p. Series: Tales of Goldstone Wood, #2 (978-0-7642-0782-2)

I loved this book. It’s fantastic! So much adventure and mystery, a myriad of strange and powerful creatures, happenings in the seen and unseen world, and plenty of love, hate, loyalty and betrayal. The plot is intricate, the characters interesting and the author has an amazing imagination!

This is book two in the series and I’d encourage you to read the first book, Heartless, before reading Veiled Rose as the stories overlap and share a few characters. It’s not essential but helps fill in the story a bit. The first is very enjoyable and just as imaginative and rich a tale as this one.

The summer he was eleven Leo was sent to Hill House under the care of his aunt. He was a privileged boy of noble birth who thought the hills and mountains surrounding Hill House far more alluring than his studies. The servants and village folk spoke in worried tones about a monster than lived in the region and Leo decided he would spend his summer searching for and then fighting the monster. Instead he finds Rose Red. A strange girl clothed in rags and wrapped in veils, who is amazingly strong for one so little, and who knows the hills and mountains (and their secrets) like a taxi cab driver knows his city.

Leo and Rose Red have great fun together playing in a stream, wandering the forest and pretending to hunt the monster. But there are forces fighting to guide their steps that they are unaware of that summer. When Leo returns to Hill House several summers later and then takes Rose Red under his care as a servant (her father had died) a very real dragon appears, forcing them to each hunt and fight the monster on their own. But at what cost?

At the end an excerpt from the next book Moonblood is given and it promises to tell more about Rose Red. It comes out in April 2012 and I can’t wait! Plus I just discovered Anne Elisabeth Stengl’s blog and can’t wait to explore it. Though if you don’t want to spoil Veiled Rose, I’d suggest you don’t read the A-Z blog series she started this month as a run up to the release of book three, but her Dragon Tuesday posts from Oct-Dec last year are quite fun and informative.

Loved these books! They are clean as a shiny new whistle. No “adult” scenes or bad language. The writing is excellent (usually I can whip through a book in no time, but the story is so complex that it takes me a bit longer, which is nice), the setting well developed and described and the characters fascinating. Highly recommend it!

Go read it! Wake County, NC; OR Greene County,OH; OR Cleveland, OH; OR Buy it from CBD; OR Find it at a library near you; Update 9/17/12: OR Buy it from Amazon