Review: The Everlasting Rose by Dhonielle Clayton

The Everlasting Rose is the follow-up to The Belles, a YA dystopian/steampunk/fantasy that follows Camellia Beauregard, who is a Belle. The Belles are blessed by the goddess of beauty to be able to change the grey skin and dull straw-like hair of the nation Orleans into a dazzling array of beauty for a price, of course. They are raised to learn the talents they will need to provide these services, then whisked off to the Royal Palace when they turn 16. The Queen chooses a favorite to be satiation there while the others are stationed at various tea houses where they provide the painful treatments that make others beautiful.

Normally I do the recommendation part at the end of a review, but this has some spoilers, so I moved it up top. I don't think this is a bad sequel/concluding novel; it just didn't do enough for me. I would still recommend reading it to finish the series, and maybe you will not agree with my opinions on the book. I would probably still read a follow-up book. And I would 100% still recommend reading The Belles; I did really like the story in the first novel.

Goodreads makes this series seem like a trilogy when, in reality, it seems to be a duology with the potential to have a continuing story at a later date. This makes some of my feelings about this book even more complicated. This book did not feel like a concluding book, it did wrap up the plot and give the characters resolution, but I felt that the story was very disjointed in a way that I weirdly would have been less bothered by if it was the second of three. A lot of this book felt more convenient than it did earned. The Iron Ladies, a resistance group that is first mentioned about a third of the way into this book, in particular.

Halfway through the book I was also struck that I didn't know what Camellia, our main character, wants aside from her sisters' safety. She felt less like a real person in this book. I wish she would have had some inner conflict relating to her relationship with her sisters or something. I just didn't feel like the characterization was nearly as strong as it was in book one. She just felt like her only personality trait was being protective; she wanted to protect her sisters, her dragons (which dragons feel so out of place in this steampunk/dystopian/light fantasy world), and Remy.

The romance also didn't really work for me. This is very weird because I really liked this relationship in book one. I think having Remy gone for about half of the book makes the romantic resolution not that exciting, especially when book one didn't establish a strong romantic bond. I wanted to see their relationship flourish in this book, and instead, it just gets a little bit of build-up, then he leaves, and we see him like twice more. The end of book one had Camellia just beginning to like Remy as a person; how was she basically in love with him by the open of book two?

I also found the love triangle aspect of the series lackluster. I am not anti-love triangle; I do tend to like love triangles when they are representative of a larger choice the main character has to make (An Ember in the Ashes, The Infernal Devices, The Hunger Games). The third in this triangle, Auguste, had a very odd plot conclusion. I did really like that this book didn't preach that you must forgive everyone, but the side switching felt very odd. I just don't think there was enough information on what was going on at the Palace for this plot point to make sense to me.

Speaking of what was going on elsewhere, I feel like I might have enjoyed this series more if it had more than one point of view character. I think that might have helped me actually fear that bad guy, Princess Sophia, in this book. She was just so incredibly cartoony. In the first book, I found her unhinged and formidable, but as the ruler, it seemed nonsensical that she wouldn't have been overthrown almost immediately? Also, it is so hard to see her as an evil overlord who is constantly surveying everyone, running experiments on humans, doing other securing the throne activities, and being drunk or in beauty treatments as often as she was shown to be in the book. If she is completely unhinged and singled minded in wanting beauty, I do not understand how she is also securing alliances while torturing those same people? Also I just completely do not understand what any of the men are doing in this society. The politics of the world just seemed a little bit wonky.

The core idea of the story, the commentary on beauty, kind of felt a little bit lost in this book. I wanted more explanation on how being a Gris, a person with grey skin, was bad for you and how the Iron Ladies managed to get around that. This not being addressed in-depth seems to undercut the message of the series. And Camellia didn't seem to grapple with beauty much at all in this book. I do like that the author clearly wrote different skin tones, hair textures, and body shapes as beautiful, but I wanted more from this conversation. More about why beauty matters so much to us. And more about how exactly being the most beautiful person is beneficial to Sophia. If anyone can change themselves to look any way they like, then why does Sophia have so much power because she makes sure she is the most beautiful? I just don't understand the Sophia story very well clearly.

The one thing I think I liked about Sophia's storyline was how it ended. Most YA dystopian does the same thing to the villain at the end, and I liked that Clayton made a different choice. I am not sure that I loved the execution of that choice, I really think this book could have had another 50 pages, but I liked the idea a lot.

The worldbuilding also just served to confuse me more about the world. The more I learned, the more questions that were raised, and then the book ended. It really felt so much like a middle book until the last like 40 pages. I wanted to know more about how the Belles worked, which we did kind of get, but I wanted to know more about their interplay with the greys. And how they survived with so many people and so few Belles. Even with the additional Belles, I am not sure it really makes sense to me. I really didn't love the conclusion for Madame Dubare; it felt very untethered from the emotions of the first book.

The language in this book is just as flowery and metaphorical as it was in the first book. But it didn't work for me as well in this book. It distracted me from the story as often as it helped me to understand character or setting. Claytons writing is beautiful, but it did walk the line of absurdity for me in this book.

This review does sound like I thought this book was awful, but I don't think that is accurate either. I just wanted more from so many fundamental areas. I don't think there was anything I hated, just a lot that felt sudden or like I needed more information. If this was book two of three, the rating would probably be a 3, I might feel a little bad that it wasn't a 4, but I would be comfortable with a solid 3. But I am struggling to give a 3 to this book as the end of a story. I just felt like I wanted so much more from this story.

I gave this book 2 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph.