Title: Rose, Interrupted
Author: Patrice Lawrence
Genre: Contemporary YA
Format: Paperback
Length: 400 pages
Publisher: Hodder Children’s Books
Publication Date: 25th July 2019
My Rating: ★★★ (3 stars)
Goodreads | Storygraph
Synopsis:
Being a teenager is hard enough, but it’s even harder in a world you’ve never known …
Eighteen months ago, 17-year-old Rose and 13-year-old Rudder escaped a strict religious sect with their mum. They are still trying to make sense of the world outside – no more rules about clothes and books, films and music, no more technology bans. But also no more friendship with the people they’ve known all their lives, no community and no certainty. It doesn’t help that their mum has to work all hours to pay rent on their cramped, smelly, one-bed flat above a kebab shop in Hackney.
While Rudder gorges on once-taboo Harry Potters and dances to Simon and Garfunkel and show tunes, Rose swaps the ankle skirts and uncut hair of the Woodford Pilgrims for Japanese-cute fairy dress and her new boyfriend, Kye. Kye, who she wants with all her being. But there’s loads of scary stuff about their new life that Rose and Rudder have no idea how to handle – it’s normal for girls to let their boyfriends take naked pictures of them, right?
When Rudder accidentally sets a devastating chain of events into action, Rose must decide whether to sacrifice everything and go back to the life she hates, in order to save the people she loves.
A story about coming of age, slap-bang in the middle of a strange new world.
My Review:
I struggled with this book to start with, I found it a little slow in the beginning and found myself distracted by other books that I wanted to read. I stuck with it though and I enjoyed where the story went.
It follows Rose and Rudder as they navigate a world outside the religion, they were raised in. Rose wants to decommission, she is ready to embrace the new world that she is in and experience the complexities of it all; social media, relationships, weird and wonderful outfits. On the other side, Rudder wants to go back to the community he grew up in. He hates the outside world and everything in it.
The main topic of this novel centres around consent, and sexually offensive crimes. I felt this was an extremely important topic to draw attention too and it was handled really well. The representation of religion highlighted some of the toxic and scary ideals that they can have without hating on them. I found myself more frustrated with the adults, who failed to help them and the other characters who manipulated them. I wanted to reach in and protect them.
This novel touched on some important topics and is a very emotional book, but I felt that the pacing affected my enjoyment of the novel, and I wanted to see more confrontation between the family that remained in the cult and those that went into the world.
