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A review by ruxandra_grr
The Poppy and the Rose by Ashlee Cowles
2.0
If anything, I really admire what Ashlee Cowles tried to do with The Poppy and the Rose. There are a lot of promising elements here – we follow two main characters, whose journeys are mirrored and echoed in two different timelines – but there is such a thing as way too many promising elements.
Taylor is a teenage girl who gets a spot in a journalism summer program at Oxford in out own time. But she is also there to maybe sneakily find out more about a photograph in which the father she is still grieving is holding a mystery woman. But, for someone who wants to be an investigative journalist, she doesn’t really have to do much investigating, because she is approached by the driver of a mysterious Lady Mae Knight right as she gets to her Oxford lodgings.
Through a series of events, Taylor ends up reading the journal of Ava, a privileged young woman who writes an account of her transatlantic journey on the Titanic.
This seems simple enough, but there are way too many elements at play in the novel that don’t really coalesce into a focused story and I’m not going to give details about them, just enumerate. We have a society of psychics, we have an assortment of real life Titanic characters, we have two blooming romances, two mothers who are apparently mentally unstable (and rather judged for it), namedropping of Freud and Jung in a pretty awkward way. Then there are two father suspected of cheating on their wives, a gothic manor, a Miss Havisham like mysterious old woman, not one but two whodunnits that aren’t investigated all that much, grand foreshadowing of World War I, and a Serbian plot to… maybe bring about a communist utopia? Which yeah, historically speaking didn’t turn out so well in Eastern Europe, but also is treated a bit strange in the context of what we are living right now in 2020.
“But if you fail, Lady Ava, I cannot protect you from the coming clash that is sure to dismantle Europe’s class system, once and for all,” says one of the characters, ominously and not at all subtly.
Then there’s stuff about freewriting and the occult, Glastonbury Abbey, curses on the males of a family, treasure hunts, and a very intriguing concept called vesica pisces, which as a Pisces I feel morally obligated to research further.
I feel like all of the details present don’t manage to recreate the texture of a significant historical event – the sinking of the Titanic and the era it took place in -, but quite the opposite, they seem like references being ticked off a list. And the kind of hindsight wink wink jokes peppered all over the 1912 timeline. There was one that made me groan, about little dogs that belong to wealthy women and how “Soon they’ll be carting them around in specialty-made handbags”.
But time and time again, when I read, there is one thing that makes or breaks a book for me, and that’s compelling characters. If they were vivid enough to ground all of the disparate elements that make up the book, then I would shut my yapping and be very into it. Unfortunately, for me, neither Taylor, nor Ava works as a lived in, breathing, of course she would do that character. For much of the book, things seem to just happen to them. And I’m not going to say anything else, because I don’t want to spoil anybody, but there is not much agency or spark there.
**Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC (yay, my first ARC) for an honest review**
Taylor is a teenage girl who gets a spot in a journalism summer program at Oxford in out own time. But she is also there to maybe sneakily find out more about a photograph in which the father she is still grieving is holding a mystery woman. But, for someone who wants to be an investigative journalist, she doesn’t really have to do much investigating, because she is approached by the driver of a mysterious Lady Mae Knight right as she gets to her Oxford lodgings.
Through a series of events, Taylor ends up reading the journal of Ava, a privileged young woman who writes an account of her transatlantic journey on the Titanic.
This seems simple enough, but there are way too many elements at play in the novel that don’t really coalesce into a focused story and I’m not going to give details about them, just enumerate. We have a society of psychics, we have an assortment of real life Titanic characters, we have two blooming romances, two mothers who are apparently mentally unstable (and rather judged for it), namedropping of Freud and Jung in a pretty awkward way. Then there are two father suspected of cheating on their wives, a gothic manor, a Miss Havisham like mysterious old woman, not one but two whodunnits that aren’t investigated all that much, grand foreshadowing of World War I, and a Serbian plot to… maybe bring about a communist utopia? Which yeah, historically speaking didn’t turn out so well in Eastern Europe, but also is treated a bit strange in the context of what we are living right now in 2020.
“But if you fail, Lady Ava, I cannot protect you from the coming clash that is sure to dismantle Europe’s class system, once and for all,” says one of the characters, ominously and not at all subtly.
Then there’s stuff about freewriting and the occult, Glastonbury Abbey, curses on the males of a family, treasure hunts, and a very intriguing concept called vesica pisces, which as a Pisces I feel morally obligated to research further.
I feel like all of the details present don’t manage to recreate the texture of a significant historical event – the sinking of the Titanic and the era it took place in -, but quite the opposite, they seem like references being ticked off a list. And the kind of hindsight wink wink jokes peppered all over the 1912 timeline. There was one that made me groan, about little dogs that belong to wealthy women and how “Soon they’ll be carting them around in specialty-made handbags”.
But time and time again, when I read, there is one thing that makes or breaks a book for me, and that’s compelling characters. If they were vivid enough to ground all of the disparate elements that make up the book, then I would shut my yapping and be very into it. Unfortunately, for me, neither Taylor, nor Ava works as a lived in, breathing, of course she would do that character. For much of the book, things seem to just happen to them. And I’m not going to say anything else, because I don’t want to spoil anybody, but there is not much agency or spark there.
**Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an ARC (yay, my first ARC) for an honest review**