The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "The Care and Handling of Roses With Thorns," mainly because I felt the author, Margaret Dilloway, did a commendable job creating well-rounded characters in Gal and Riley. I believed them and in them, and that made me interested in finishing the novel. It was a well-paced novel with a satisfactory ending. ( )

A friend recommended this book and so I decided to borrow it from the library. Coincidentally, this is my last read of 2012. I enjoyed the book but thought it was a little predictable.

Gal Garner is a biology teacher at a small Catholic high school. She is also an amateur rose breeder, hence the title, and she is waiting for a kidney donor. She's had kidney disease since she was young and has had a donor kidney already but it has failed. She has to go for dialysis every second night so she doesn't have a lot of free time. She is single and hasn't really ever dated. Her parents, who live elsewhere, worry about her. Her older sister Becky has always resented the extra attention Gal gets. That doesn't stop her from neglecting her own daughter, Bailey. When Becky gets a job offer in Hong Kong she puts Bailey on a bus to her Aunt Gal without even notifying Gal. So, along with everything else, Gal has to raise a teen-age girl, one who has double the issues that most teenagers have.

I can't judge about the rose breeding but Dilloway has certainly gotten the information about kidney disease and waiting for a transplant right. A friend of mine got a kidney transplant shortly after I met her but I was able to see the effects of the disease on her so I know that's correct. I think, though, that the criteria for matching kidneys has changed and it is much easier to find a donor kidney now or at least easier than Dilloway portrays it. People should still sign their organ donor card though. ( )

Galilee Garner—Gal for short—is a prickly person at best, and something of a loner. A biology teacher at a private high school, she is known to students and faculty alike as a hard taskmaster, but one who prides herself on turning out more AP exam high-scorers than anyone else. She lives alone, with only one close friend—her polar opposite, the school’s sensitive and outgoing art teacher. She’s also in the end stages of kidney failure and must keep to a strict dialysis schedule to survive. Her one main ambition in life is to breed the next unique, stand-out breed of rose in the greenhouse out back. Gal’s carefully structured existence is thrown into disarray when her unreliable sister’s teenage daughter Riley arrives unannounced on Gal’s front stoop. At first resistant, Gal begins to soften to her niece and the two—one damaged by years of chronic illness, the other by years of neglect and sporadic affection dished out by a drug-addicted mother—form a tentative bond. Riley begins to find herself among her fellow students and Gal finds herself reaching out and making new friends herself, something she never expected.

While the rose-related metaphor is the tiniest bit heavy-handed, the story is a touching one as an at first thoroughly unlikeable character begins to develop into a better version of herself and a dysfunctional family comes together with a new understanding of each other’s struggles. ( )

Galilee Garner, called Gal by her few friends, lives a strict and very precisely regimented life. Part of this is out of necessity as she has a chronic kidney disease that has had her on thrice weekly dialysis for almost 10 years after her previous transplants eventually failed. But part of it is who she has become in her life: a bitter, prickly, inflexible, exacting biology teacher at the local Catholic high school who holds her students to impossible standards and who has lost all sense of the social niceties. She is firm and rude and clipped with others believing that she alone is cutting through the BS and being honest and truthful, uncaring of her effect on others. In reality, she has encased herself in a thorny covering to protect herself, to avoid the unwanted pity or the falsely sympathetic. It is only when Gal gets home from her days at school and moves into the solitude and sanctuary of her greenhouses to work with her beloved Hulthemia roses that she blossoms. She is not simply a rose grower, she is a rose breeder, determined to cultivate a rose worthy of being called Queen of Show, to bring the elusive fragrance back to her favorite type of cultivar.

When Gal's niece Riley, her estranged addict sister Becky's teenaged daughter, shows up unannounced and unexpected at her school, Gal's carefully guarded life is thrown into turmoil. Riley's mother has sent her to stay while she pursues a job across the globe, neither asking her sister's permission to send her daughter nor preparing her daughter emotionally for the massive changes both of them will have to make to accomodate the other. Riley is fragile after her mother's abandonment, academically behind, emotionally mercurial, and she is slow to fit in with her classmates at the school where Gal teaches. She does try to fit into this aunt she hadn't seen in years' world but she is every bit as damaged a child as Gal is an adult and there are frequent episodes of drama or tantrums from her. Riley's very presence challenges Gal and her notion of refusing to compromise as she tries to suddenly parent a three quarters grown child and comes to realize that the first and most important key to parenting is flexibility, completely counter to the mantra of her life thus far.

Gal very definitely starts off as an unlikable character and since she is the first person narrator, this presents a hurdle to the reader. But anyone who stays with the novel will be rewarded by watching Gal slowly change. The changes are neither easy nor absolute but they are honest and presented (complete with backsliding) in the way that real life works. Her tentative opening up of her heart to Riley and the other secondary characters and an eventual serious, close and unflinching examination of herself and her effect on others is well-done and believable. The abrasive Gal of the beginning of the book is kinder and gentler, less judgmental but with her firm moral core still intact, making her more likable over all. The insights into growing roses and the painstaking care with which their breeding occurs is interesting as is the glimpse into the competitive world of showing roses although the breadth of information could overwhelm some readers uninterested in the mechanics of gardening. Life with a chronic disease and the impact that the disease has on every aspect of a person, including personality and varying perceptions of those not suffering such a fate, is fascinating and well-integrated into the story thanks to Gal's self-referential musings. A touching look at the way we live in the world, compassion, how we treat others, and the love we carry for family, this is a quick and rewarding read. ( )