The Everlasting Rose

What would you do to be beautiful? Camellia and her sisters are Belles. Only they can be beautiful.
All our lives, my sisters and I have served the people of Orleans.
For years, they’ve held their abilities over us. Not anymore.
Now the queen hunts us, because we know the truth about the rightful heir.
Camellia murdered our princess and fled with her sisters.
The princess is still alive, and we’ll help her take back the throne.
Together, we will return the Belles to their rightful place.
The queen wants us caged. But we will not go quietly.
Then they will give us what we deserve: beauty, everlasting.
We demand our freedom. No matter what the cost.

I was a MASSIVE fan of The Belles from Dhonielle Clayton. I became pretty obsessed with it when it came out and was all over again when I reread it in anticipation of The Everlasting Rose, the sequel. The rich and complexly imagined world; the complicated dynamics between the women who loved each other but, regardless, had been raised to compete; the stark ridiculousness and horror of the way that the beauty industry overtook the importance of any other single thing in Orleans; the way the Belles had been raised to believe they were basically Goddesses on earth so they didn’t notice they were actually slaves – all of his came together in a fantastic slow burn novel that utterly captivated me. Also, Remy – sigh – the stern and watchful but also adorable with his younger sisters sexy soldier of my dreams.

So, when I picked up The Everlasting Rose, obviously my expectations were high, as were my fear levels – I knew not everybody was getting out of this situation alive.

I was right about the latter*, if not the former.

*Come on – barely a spoiler. Someone always bites the dust in a series like this.

Unfortunately, where its predecessor completely took over my brain and immersed me in its strange and morally bankrupt world, The Everlasting Rose was comparatively a little… all over the place. For a start the romance with Remy goes from nought to one hundred in, like, the first chapter. Which was fine – as I have mentioned, I am a big fan of Remy – but it felt a little rushed. And rushed, as it turns out, would be the theme for this entire novel.

The pacing just felt off. Admittedly I hadn’t understood it was a duology, so had assumed this book would be the middle of the series rather than the end. Even putting that aside, though, you get to the last 50 pages or so and everything looks terrible and you have that moment you always have – or, at least, I always have – where you think wow this writer is clearly planning on pulling off something pretty amazing so this ending isn’t a disappointing clusterfuck and then, they don’t. The Everlasting Rose, I’m genuinely really sad to say, was one of those.

There were a lot of things in the book that I really liked – Dhonielle Clayton continues to take complex ideas and live in the grey with them through her characters. It just felt like those moments weren’t as fully developed as they were before. The Everlasting Rose is a lot about complicity – it’s a reckoning, really, for those people in Orleans that have held up the system for so long, the people whose various acts of passivity or wrong in the hope of gain had paved the way for a monster like Sophia, the main villain of the piece, to be born. Perhaps most intriguingly – and I can’t get too far into this because spoilers – she looks at how the Belles themselves can be complicit in their own imprisonment by the state. How a person can grab for power wherever they find it – even if it isn’t truly power at all – rather than seeking to dismantle the system that oppresses them. Can you blame that person? It’s hard to say, and it’s a major aspect of the book I would have liked to see explored further.

Like so many series like this built around a single female lead – ‘the special one’ – I wanted more development from the side characters. The Belles were separated for most of book one, but even in that time you had a sense of their love for each other, even when that was complicated by the competition to be the best they had been forced to play in their entire lives. In The Everlasting Rose, we finally had some time for these women to actually be together and that sense of the depth of their relationships kind of vanished. Particularly between Camellia and her best friend Amber – what could have been one of the most complex dynamics in the book – there is no time or real detail given to the situation. I know Amber isn’t a likeable or even good person most of the time, but I was intrigued by her (as we know I love a mean girl), and at the end of book one really interested to see what she would be like once she was thrown back into the mix. She never really gets her moment though, and I was disappointed by that.

Overall, still love Dhonielle, but a little confused by what happened here. I don’t know if it’s that this should have been three books rather than two – something I would very rarely advocate for – or something else, but The Everlasting Rose just fell flat for me. Underdeveloped and rushed – if ultimately somewhat saved by how much we love the characters because of an absolutely fantastic book one – this was still ultimately an enjoyable read, if not the experience I was hoping to have.