T. T. Escurel

This was a short, breezy book that could have been shorter. Literally, physically shorter, that is—there was a lot of blank space on each page. The broad margins and deep indents were distracting to me, although I’ve seen it happen before with many small presses and self-publishing authors. Too many, honestly, considering with print-on-demand books price is determined by pagecount, and although I got this book for free via a GoodReads giveaway, I still winced at seeing wasted money with all that unsed paper.

Why is this a big deal? It isn’t, except right away it left the book seeming less professional than it could have been. I think that carried on to the prose, plotting, and characterization, which didn’t lack promise so much as polish.

I was attracted to this story by its sort of Gothic cover, and its similar Gothic promise in that the romantic hero is described as being “murdered at eight” on the back cover. Yet he is, paradoxically, our romantic hero, Corvin. A clever bit of dark magic, that! The relationship between he and his “mother,” the dark witch who murdered and resurrected him, was as creepy as I could wish, and cast a dark cloud over Corvin’s relationship with Princess Astra.

The setting for this fantasy/fairy tale was also clever and a bit playful: 4 houses based on the suits of cards, also echoing the Tarot-style deck used by the dark magicians for their magic. I feel a roleplaying game could easily be set here. The titular House of Rose is also a clever play on the Sleeping Beauty tale, only genderswapped as Astra needs to rescue her spoiled, entitled betrothed with true love’s kiss—although her true love is not with him but Corvin. However, like many fairytales, this story is more outlined than fleshed out. The prose was also awkward, including misused words (ex: once a character says something “abhors me” when I’m sure he means “disgusts me”) and uneven—sometimes the young protagonists sounded like modern teenagers, and sometimes fairytale queens. I was attracted to the surface trappings but never pulled in deep; never convinced I was reading something that actually happened (which is a thing that can happen, even when reading fantasy).

While I was attracted for the dark magic, I was a bit…well, “put off” may be too strong a word, but I was surprised and not really in a good way by the sudden appearance of talking animals and cartoony fairies. I love cute and fluffy things. But the tiny fairies just seemed twee. The bigger faeries also had their moments of being Fae Ex Machina and moving people around, explaining the plot to them, and rescuing them from dungeons, all in a way that hampered the tension. If a fairy godmother is going to make everything okay, why worry?

Happily, the actual solution to the conflict is pointed at by the faeries but must be discovered and enacted by the protagonists themselves. There is a rigorous logic to the world’s three magics: dark, light, and the high magic that rules beyond both. Yet I couldn’t tease out the logic of the characters themselves so easily: archetypal, sometimes flat, they didn’t have a lot of chemistry and the history of their relationship was unclear to me. Astra dreams of Corvin, but how well did they know each other before her House is attacked?

With appeal to lovers of fairy stories and magic systems, if not other aspects of worldbuilding, this is an okay story with the potential to have been much more.… (meer)