Roses and Rot by Kat Howard

Roses and Rot

3/5. Two sisters, a writer and a dancer, are accepted to an exclusive artist’s fellowship. They want to work on their art and they want to escape memories of their abusive mother, but things get complicated when it emerges that the fellowship has entanglements with the fae.

So life is very very complicated right now, and the things I’m reading only ever get a sliver of my attention. But really, how did I not realize until halfway through this book that it’s a Tam Lin story? Good lord.

Other revelations: I am tired of Tam Lin stories. Which is to say my limited interest in them has been satisfied by reading, like, three in the course of my life and now I’m good.

If you are not tired of Tam Lin stories, this is a pretty good one. It has a lot of first novel problems, but there’s a very human messiness at the heart of this book that works. Something that doesn’t work? Having the protagonist be a writer who writes supposedly good stuff, and sticking passages of her extremely on-the-nose Kat-Valente-without-most-of-the-talent stories in the book. I swear, writing about writers and their Art is so treacherous, I don’t know why anyone does it.

Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett

Elysium

3/5. How to describe this? A string of vignettes setting personal concerns – illness, disputes, romance -- against glimpses of an alien invasion of Earth and its aftermath. Except each vignette reshuffles the constellation of main characters, changing genders and interrelationships and sociological settings. The main two are sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes lovers, sometimes siblings, sometimes something else.

This is strange and slippery and very accomplished, on a technical level. The shape of an actual novel doesn’t emerge until the last quarter or so; before that it’s all in the art of the iterative vignettes that circle the same stories from different angles. There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot of it remains inexplicable to me (WTF with the owl, I ask you?). The parts I do get are playing interesting rhetorical games with science fictional tropes and gender, which I dig.

So I found this rewarding. But it’s also just that little bit not my thing, and I suspect someone whose more interested in metafiction would get more out of this.