Roses and Rot Is a Darkly Spun Modern Fairy Tale
From the moment Imogen steps onto the campus of Melete, an elite arts program to which she’s written her way to acceptance, nothing seems quite real. In her surreal first few days, a stroll across campus feels like the opening montage of a movie, with everything “just a shade brighter than real.”
In many ways, you’ll come to learn, this is true of the central setting of Roses and Rot, Kat Howard’s intriguing debut novel. There’s a fairy tale quality mixed in with the haunting, gothic overtones of this contemporary fantasy. That’s appropriate, given Imogen’s fascination with fairy tales—that will happen when you’ve got a your mother makes wicked stepmothers pale in comparison.
Roses and Rot
Hardcover $24.99
Roses and Rot
By Kat Howard
In Stock Online
Hardcover $24.99
It’s that past that has led Imogen and her younger sister Marin down the winding path to two artists’ residencies at Melete. Creativity often originates from the same wellspring as trauma, and having survived the emotional and physical abuse of their mother, the sisters have pursued their respective passions: fiction and ballet.
Melete’s unreality for Imogen is also tied to Marin, to whom she was estranged for nearly a decade. Now, given time and distance from their troubled home life, the two have mended many of the hurts between them, and they hope to work on the rest during their year studying their crafts.
In the field of contemporary fantasy, Neil Gaiman is the master of making the ordinary unfamiliar, of infusing a setting with both wonder and uncertainty. There’s a reason his blurb of praise appears on the cover of Roses and Rot: while to Imogen, Melete is a wonderland of sorts, Marin and the rest of the residents react with some degree of reticence at the pervasive oddness of their surroundings.
To speak too much of the fantasy elements would be to reveal a plot as cloaked in them as the eerily dense forest surrounds Melete. There is mischief, and there is mayhem, and they threaten to tear Imogen and Marin apart once more.
The supernatural aside, the sisters are not only competing against the artists around them, but with each other, as they strive for success—and a future free from the past. Even in lighter moments, that innate tension drapes the scenery, settling on every character differently, but settling nonetheless.
This buzz of background friction is cleverly reflected in the way the story is told—Howard’s writing is clear and propulsive, the engine moving the story forward, but the narrative is interspersed with snatches of the fairy tales Imogen writes, dark and lush and ominous. The sudden switches are jarring, mimicking the disorientation so apparent at Melete.
It’s a tricky business, maintaining this level of surreality, but Howard’s modern fairy tale unsettles from start to finish. The drama of Imogen and Marin’s reality carries you seamlessly into the fantastical adventure before them—you can’t appreciate a fairy godmother until you’ve dealt with the wickedness of the stepmother, after all. The plot stokes both fires until they burn as one, threatening to consume all in the sisters’ sphere.
The two eventually lose their way, wandering off the path. But that’s only ever half the story, and the other half is at the crux of this story: how badly do you want to find your way back, and what are you willing to sacrifice to get there?
Preorder Roses and Rot, available May 17.
It’s that past that has led Imogen and her younger sister Marin down the winding path to two artists’ residencies at Melete. Creativity often originates from the same wellspring as trauma, and having survived the emotional and physical abuse of their mother, the sisters have pursued their respective passions: fiction and ballet.
Melete’s unreality for Imogen is also tied to Marin, to whom she was estranged for nearly a decade. Now, given time and distance from their troubled home life, the two have mended many of the hurts between them, and they hope to work on the rest during their year studying their crafts.
In the field of contemporary fantasy, Neil Gaiman is the master of making the ordinary unfamiliar, of infusing a setting with both wonder and uncertainty. There’s a reason his blurb of praise appears on the cover of Roses and Rot: while to Imogen, Melete is a wonderland of sorts, Marin and the rest of the residents react with some degree of reticence at the pervasive oddness of their surroundings.
To speak too much of the fantasy elements would be to reveal a plot as cloaked in them as the eerily dense forest surrounds Melete. There is mischief, and there is mayhem, and they threaten to tear Imogen and Marin apart once more.
The supernatural aside, the sisters are not only competing against the artists around them, but with each other, as they strive for success—and a future free from the past. Even in lighter moments, that innate tension drapes the scenery, settling on every character differently, but settling nonetheless.
This buzz of background friction is cleverly reflected in the way the story is told—Howard’s writing is clear and propulsive, the engine moving the story forward, but the narrative is interspersed with snatches of the fairy tales Imogen writes, dark and lush and ominous. The sudden switches are jarring, mimicking the disorientation so apparent at Melete.
It’s a tricky business, maintaining this level of surreality, but Howard’s modern fairy tale unsettles from start to finish. The drama of Imogen and Marin’s reality carries you seamlessly into the fantastical adventure before them—you can’t appreciate a fairy godmother until you’ve dealt with the wickedness of the stepmother, after all. The plot stokes both fires until they burn as one, threatening to consume all in the sisters’ sphere.
The two eventually lose their way, wandering off the path. But that’s only ever half the story, and the other half is at the crux of this story: how badly do you want to find your way back, and what are you willing to sacrifice to get there?
Preorder Roses and Rot, available May 17.