In the Roses of Pieria by Anna Burke
January 20, 2024
In the acknowledgements at the end of this book, the author, Anna Burke, mentions that this was originally supposed to be a novella before expanding into a duology, and I can't help but think that it should have remained a novella. There's a lot going on in this first of two books and, I confess, I ended up not caring much about a lot of it.
Clara is a broke academic who is offered what is essentially her dream job, completely out of the blue, seemingly no-strings-attached. After a little hesitation (after all, if it seems too good to be true it usually is) she begins working as a translator and archivist for the mysterious Agatha Montague, and relocates to live on her estate. It is here that she soon becomes consumed both with an ancient correspondence between two women, and her boss's standoffish assistant, Fiadh. As she digs deeper into Agatha's collection of ancient artifacts, she begins to suspect that somethings isn't quite right with her new employer, and she may be in too deep to get out.
There's a lot of elements here that I love - dark academia, Ancient Greece, sapphics, vampires - but it starts to feel like too much and by the end, I was skimming pages just to reach the conclusion. I thought the first half was solid. Clara isn't my favorite, or the most interesting character ever, but I enjoyed watching her relationship with Fiadh develop (though it happens quite quick).
I think the problem is that the most interesting and complex characters and relationships are not the ones we end up focusing on. Agatha is objectively one of, if not the most, intriguing characters with an intricate backstory and complex relationships with Fiadh and another character I won't name so that this can stay as spoiler-free as possible. But we hear virtually nothing from her and, because our viewpoint character is Clara, she's regarded as a basic, scary bad guy for much of the book.
The relationship which is revealed within the letters between Gata and Natek is given so much "screen time" in the first half and is debatably the best part of the book, but it doesn't feel like gets the resolution or service that it deserves.
And after all the quiet studying and mysterious atmosphere, the last third turns into an action set piece almost out of nowhere and this is really where the book lost me. It felt like too much and too sudden of a tonal shift and I found that I just didn't really care enough about any of these characters to worry too much about what would happen to them. And instead of following along with any of the more interesting characters, we're stuck with Clara (and Fiadh, when they're together) who spends much of this part of the book trapped in a single room!
If you are more of a romance/romantasy reader than I am, maybe these things will be unproblematic or easier to ignore for you. But this just fell so short of what I hoped it would be. I did actually like the cliffhanger ending (though I have no plans to read the sequel), and I will admit that it's quite quotable in parts. Here's one of my favorite exchanges from the letters between Gata and Natek:
"You say I will not hear from you again. I cannot make that same promise. I'll write to you. I'll sing of you. I'll paint your face into the histories, and each word, each note, each stroke of brush will be for you, so that you remember me - even in another time."
