Rosebud, Paul Cornell
Received to review via Netgalley
I didn’t quite know what to make of Rosebud, honestly. It has a slightly weird format with some odd sort-of-ish time travel stuff going on, plus it’s written in a very stream-of-consciousness sort of way with an oddball cast that change how they’re represented a couple of times. I felt like I could do with a dramatis personae or something to help me keep track, and I normally stubbornly ignore those. Like, Bob is a balloon (seriously), but also a tiger… and Huge If True is a whole mess of hands, but then also Bob Ross? Etc, for each character.
It also has this whole subplot about the whole world being awful for queer people, including flashbacks to a trans woman being made to dress as male in public while being sort-of-but-not-really executed and tortured, which… is mentioned somewhat in a content note at the start, so I can’t say I wasn’t warned, but it sits funny because it’s off-hand, somewhere in the background of the story. Partly that’s in the same way that Brexit is in the background of the Lychford books, for instance… and I do get the urge to write about the way the world is right now (especially in the UK) to comment on it, but it didn’t quite work for me.
It didn’t quite come together for me, I guess; I did like the ending, and thought there was a lot of cleverness going on, but I spent too much of it not really engaged with what was going on because I was having trouble keeping track of characters.
