I’ve learned over the years that my level of excitement for a book club book is not necessarily a good indicator of how much I’ll enjoy it. In the case of Roses & Rot, though, I was intrigued by the premise of an artist’s community with a magical twist and I ended up thoroughly enjoying Kat Howard’s prose, which definitely fit the fairy-tale theme of the book. As I type this, I realise that book club was very careful not to spoil exactly what kind of magic is happening in Roses & Rot, and so I shall attempt to do the same.
Roses & Rot is a book that’s firing on all cylinders: the characters and their relationships are compelling, the plot drops some serious complications into those relationships, the setting and the prose are both equally enchanting and Kat Howard uses fairy-tale elements to do more than simply retread old ground. Imogen’s project while living in the artist’s community is writing fairy tales, and the snippets Kat Howard gives us from her in-world work are beautiful and sinister in roughly equal measure.
The most dangerous thing you could be in a fairy tale was to be a girl with a mother.
Roses & Rot, Kat Howard
The fairy tales in question are the traditional kind and fittingly, Kat Howard’s main relationships are of the sister-and-sister or mother-and-daughter variety, not the romantic love we get in modern adaptations. There are romantic relationships depicted in Roses & Rot, but they’re not the focus. Instead, we get a lot of female friendships, and artists relating to other artists, whether competitively, collaboratively or with a more experienced artist acting as mentor.
I wasn’t angry anymore, not really. Just tired, and achingly bored of the cliché of it all, the feeling that my humiliation had been part of a badly-written script.
Roses & Rot, Kat Howard
While Roses & Rot is very richly written, some of the emotional beats could have hit harder. Perhaps this is partly because the world of Melete is isolated from reality, and most of the people there have known one another for under a year, but even the big sister-sister plot complications didn’t completely drive their emotions home. That said, it didn’t at all hamper the enjoyment of the reading experience.
There are a lot of fantasy books using fairy-tale elements, and for me Roses & Rot is one of the better ones. I’ll definitely be revisiting this, possibly in audiobook form if it’s available.
Chalk Letters Books 