Listened to the audiobook with Raquel Beattie, going against my own advice to read Arkady Martine on paper. I think the narrator did fine, but this novella too is just better suited to paper than audio format.

I really liked the Teixcalaan Duology so I was excited when I found a novella by Martine on my audiobook app. Unfortunately, Rose/House didn’t really work for me.

I like Martine’s atmospheric writing style, even if it tends to be a little opaque and fuzzy around the edges. Reading the Teixcalaan Duology took some brain power, but it was well worth the reward.

Rose/House is written in a very similar style, but unlike Teixcalaan, it was mostly just confusing to me.

My feeling is that the problem is the type of book that Martine was writing. Rose/House is a cyberpunk noir. We’ve seen that before – Morgan’s Altered Carbon is probably the most obvious example – and the genre can work very well.

However, for me, a core requirement of a detective story is that the plot works.

I grew up reading Agatha Christie and watching Midsummer Murders. I do not mind a convoluted story – that’s part of the fun. But I do want the ‘oh, of course!’-moment at the resolution.

I won’t spoil Rose/House for you, but suffice to say that I didn’t have that feeling at the end of the novella. The focus on atmosphere and mystery in the writing style let down the actual mystery in the plot at the core of the detective story.

Moreover, because Rose/House is quite short, I never really got invested in any of the characters, though I do think they did have potential. But if the plot isn’t doing it and the characters don’t reel me in, the atmosphere Martine creates simply doesn’t carry the novella on its own.

I think A Memory Called Empire is one of the best sci-fi books of the past decade. So a slight miss in a novella won’t put me off reading the next thing Martine puts out. But it is interesting how a style that works great for one type of story is quite frankly detrimental to another.

It has been a while since Martine has put out a longer form work, so I am really curious to see what she is working one. You can be sure that I will review it on this website!