rainwaterspark | Review: Roses and Rot by Kat Howard

Rating: 4/5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book, but I did enjoy it overall, even if I found the details slightly underwhelming.

I usually don't like books about children abused by their parents, because I find that most of those kinds of books—particularly when written by authors who have little to no actual knowledge of child abuse—end up portraying an outsider's view of child abuse. In other words, the abusive background is there just to make the main character angst and be sad sometimes. While it's true that not everyone who has an abusive background ends up permanently psychologically scarred for life...I would like an acknowledgement by authors that child abuse often warps childrens' personalities, giving them emotional problems that affect them into adulthood. Roses and Rot is another example of this: I never got the sense that Imogen's mother's abuse affected her other than making her angst about the abuse sometimes and fear her mother. What self-esteem problems she has seem to have been framed as just regular author-related insecurity.

I did enjoy the fact that this book was a story about sisters (I mean, what can I say, I'm very close to my own sister).

The book brought up some interesting questions regarding whether your success in art is really yours if an external force has guaranteed your success; however, the book ultimately never engaged with that question, which I found pretty disappointing.

While the book perfectly captured the insecurities and neuroses related to being a creative/artist, I felt like the book didn't do enough to show what it's actually like to be a writer, ironically. Imogen hardly seemed to struggle with her book, except to say at certain points that she couldn't use words on a particular day. But there was no struggle with plot, with "what comes next?", with having to throw out and rewrite scenes or chapters. And so, in a way, this story's account of "what it means to be a writer" felt too neat and unreal.

I really disliked the title. What does "roses and rot" mean, other than to capture an aesthetic? (The phrase is used once in the book, to describe a smell, and...that's it.)