Watching the Roses

This time, Adele Geras tackles the Sleeping Beauty fairy-tale, and manages to inject an enormous sense of impending doom as she does so. Alice has had her 18th birthday – something terrible happened there. She lies in her room seemingly in a coma while the lives of those around her stop in sorrow and grief. The roses which her father lovingly cultivate rot and grow wild around their home.

The interesting choice Geras has made here is the kiss which begins the horror and the kiss which ends it. There’s the difference between a chosen embrace and a forced one; the difference between two men, or boys, fighting to get what they want or fighting for the right to it. As in her previous book, Geras decides to return the choice to the woman in the story which again makes it a far more interesting version of the fairytale.