Roses, G.R. Mannering

Roses
G. R. Mannering (Rose Mannering)
ISBN: 9781620879887
Read May 19, 2014
YA: High-fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

A note on the text: there are quite a few typographical errors and mistakes towards the end of the book - almost as if the last few chapters were rushed or not edited as carefully as the previous sections.

The author mentions somewhere that she loved Robin McKinley's dual retellings of Beauty and the Beast, and there are a few places where the homage gets uncomfortably close to the original.  However, overall, the story and some of the characters are rich and complex, although I do feel that the Beast got quite short shrift in the retelling.

If it weren't for the map, I'd be half convinced that the country itself was named State, but the map indicates that it is named Pervorocco, and there is a single Neighbor country, where Magic walks the streets.  Pervorocco is the home of a capital city named Sago, and a few outlying towns and villages, and a highland named the Hillands.  Pervorocco tries to stay out of the politics and unrest festering between the humans and the magical beings living in The Neighbor, but the civil war spills out anyway.

In the midst of this upset, a strange silver-skinned child with violet eyes is born in a pauper's hospital in Sago, the rose amulet around her neck the only clue to her heritage.  She is dutifully left with the only other member of her family, and treated as a freak because of her coloring. Her guardian insists, perhaps a bit too desperately, that the child has no magic affiliations.

One day, Sago is overrun by rebels insisting on the deaths of any Magic blooded people.  The story follows the sarcastically-named Beauty and her adopted farrier father into the mountains of the Hillands, where her story becomes entangled with that of a mysterious Beast, prisoned in an enchanted castle with a strange courtyard of 100 beautiful blood-red roses that never cease blooming.


There are inset breaks that take the reader back in time to an earlier set of characters, but unfortunately the insets don't do enough to explain the background and the actions and motivations of those characters.  Likewise, obtuse political affiliations, mysterious scriptures, and unclear magical abilities in the main text do little to explain the rationales and motivations behind most of the cast of main characters.

Perhaps, as with Marissa Meyer's Cinder, this will be the first in a larger series of re-tellings all wrapped around this Magic vs Human conflict.  I hope so, because this one left me with the sense that the Beauty and the Beast story was simply a detour to the real story being told, of Magic and politics and love and death and fear of the unknown.  If that is the case, then well and good.  If not, then it's a bit of bad form to co-opt a beloved fairy-tale and then treat it so shabbily.