Unfortunately, I should have listened to my intuition and not picked this book up. When Cindy, whose videos I am quite fond of, first announced her book, I decided to not give it a try, because nothing about the premise or the book's selling points sounded like my thing. Sleeping Beauty is my favorite Disney classic, but that's about it; I am not a fan of YA fantasy or retellings, nor meandering vibe-over-plot slow-paced stories. Still, curiosity (and the gorgeous cover) got the better of me, and I ended up reading The Secret World of Briar Rose... and not liking it much.

I think this is what happens when an author wants to tell an allegory rather than a story. They become so stubbornly focused on the Metaphor and the Symbolism and the Second Level of Interpretation, so acutely worried about stuffing enough raw material for the SparkNotes flashcards to be exhaustive, that they forget to write a novel. I remember reading the following on tumblr, half frustrated shitpost and half writing advice: "the problem with a lot of horror books nowadays is that authors want to write a book where the horror stands for something. the haunted house is always generational trauma or mental illness or some shit. and they forget to write a horror book with horror in it." This is exactly my gripe with this book. The Secret World of Briar Rose is very explicitly an allegory for depression... which also means it fails in all the basic principles that make a novel.

The characters are not characters. They are representations, like fables destined for children. In particular, Corin is the angry, combative side of depression, whereas Amelia is the passive and avoidant aspect of it. That makes every single character in this book extremely flat and one-dimensional, because they are not people, they are mouthpieces for the author to speak her truths and deliver her message. Corin and Elly's whole storyline in particular is really uninteresting compared to Amelia's and I think the book would have been much stronger if they were cut entirely, and the action focused solely on Amelia's story. The closest thing we have to an actual person is Malicine (why they are named like an antibiotic I do not know), whose backstory chapters and father storyline are also entirely superfluous. The romance is also strangely shoehorned in at the very end of the book, with no indication that the characters ever got close or had anything in common other than traumabonding? Neither of them ever mentions anything not pertaining to trauma or misery in the whole book! I thought the relationship between Amelia and Malicine was waaay more compelling than any other.

The plot is not a plot. There is no sense of progression in the book, nor actual stakes. It's all a convoluted mess of flowery prose that makes it very hard to follow the actual events unfolding. There's a vague plot of some treasure needing to be retrieved, but it very quickly takes the backseat in favor of labyrinthine ruminations that lead nowhere, and unending descriptions of the dream world. The writing in itself had its very nice moments, and shines in a few beautiful lines, but there were also a lot of grammatical mistakes and spelling errors (which I hope will be fixed in the final version), and paragraphs were very repetitive in structure with little sentence length/architecture variation, which did not help the feeling of redundancy. More than that, it's the general opacity of the prose that makes it hard to follow what's going on, and I found myself wondering what the hell I was reading quite a few times. Characters disappear and appear randomly, locations are not very clear... I understand the aim is to create a hazy, dream-like atmosphere, but it should not hinder reading comprehension unless you are an extremely talented writer and can land back on your feet. Besides, since the majority of the story is set in the dream world, which operates under confusing dream magic, nothing is important until the book tells you it is. There's a main character that (I think?) dies at around 60% and I was confused as to why it was such a big deal cause we'd been having horrible, nightmarish visions this whole time, so clearly they weren't really dead? And then they were? But then they were... willed back to life, and came back? And then died again? At which point I was like, "why should I care that they're dying again? They're already dead and you can just make stuff up from your subconscious in this world!! Just... imagine theyre alright? You JUST did that." All in all it was very confusing and I'm not sure at which point in the story they died, if they were dead all along or not... it was so boring and confusing at times that I 100% would've DNFed if I wasn't a completionist.

Lastly, the setting is not a setting. I already mentioned the problems with the dream world and its lack of consistent rules (injuries don't really matter but if you die there you die in the real world? How does that work?); but as many other reviews have pointed out, the real world is the worst offender. What are Gyldan and Zilar like? What time period is this even? The flashbacks sound like medieval fantasy, but 100 years of anarchy and crisis later we've got planes and bulldozers, but somehow both worlds have plastic AND faeries? What is this insurrection Corin keeps talking about, who are we fighting against? How can there be no government in Gyldan for 100 years, if Zilar has invaded them how have they not seized full power yet? What's society like under this war and absent regime, who are the haves and have-nots? How could the situation get so bad, couldn't they have found another ruler after Amelia fell asleep (sort of implied to be because Gyldan can only prosper if the royal family is in charge because of their golden blood or whatever, but that's disproven by the epilogue)? And how has NO ONE, in 100 years of searching, found the castle, especially in tunnels actively used by both military and guerrilla/resistance, but all of a sudden not one but two girls stumble upon it randomly? There are so many questions that the book does not answer, and it might not bother some people who are only here for vibes, but I had such a hard time picturing anything about this world and its inhabitants that it left me utterly disengaged.

The epilogue, by the way, is criminal. I sort of understand what she was going for with that ending, but how can we still think that's a satisfying conclusion in the big 2026? As if it doesn't render everything we've been suffering through for the last 300 pages null and void?

Ultimately, I'm disappointed. I fully expected not to be a fan of The Secret World of Briar Rose as i'm not the target audience, but I at least hoped Cindy would be a great writer after basing her whole platform on critiquing ridiculous books. But she is guilty of some of the same errors she so vehemently clowned in other authors, and that's disappointing. I'm also very surprised her team did not know whether to market this book as YA or adult and thought it could fit both niches, as I personally thought the characters and writing read tremendously juvenile, YA or perhaps even middle grade. There are really good ideas and concepts in this book: I love the idea of Sleeping Beauty as a metaphor for depression and escapism; Cindy clearly has an amazing imagination, and my favorite moments were the very Lewis Carroll-esque introduction of the cottage and talking animals; unfortunately this book's whimsical ideas get bogged down by its great share of issues.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing the ARC and giving me the opportunity to review the book honestly.