Thank you to the author+publisher for providing an eARC via NetGalley for an honest review. I will try my best to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.

The Secret World of Briar Rose is an interesting attempt to combine the story of Sleeping Beauty with themes of depression, suicidality, and escapism. On paper, I should have loved this book - I’m a casual fan of Cindy Pham’s YouTube channel, I love a dual POV book, and I have deeply connected with those themes of escapism and mental health struggles in other forms of media (more on this later).

Unfortunately, like some of the other reviewers here, I found the world-building so jarringly confusing that it took me completely out of the emotional story that this novel is trying to tell. An important plot element introduced early on is that one of our main characters Corin is an orphaned refugee ultimately due to the fact that our Sleeping Beauty character Amelia gave up on ruling her kingdom in favor of escaping to her dream world. And yet the geopolitical setting of this world is so vague I was always more confused about why things were happening to Corin than being upset about it happening. Has it been centuries (plural) since Amelia went to sleep, or just one century? The technological advancement (bulldozers and war planes!) implies centuries (plural), but then a plot element in the epilogue confirms just one century. The wrath of the villain character is also described multiple times as the culmination of centuries (plural) of emotions, so much so that I stopped reading during the climax to go back to the start of the book to fact-check.

This novel was always going to be a bit more confusing at baseline to follow, for a variety of reasons: 1) taking place primarily in a very precarious dream world, 2) the dual POV in separate time periods, 3) the intentional slow drip-feed of Corin’s traumatic backstory. These are okay and understandable, but combined with the poor world-building the novel felt more frustrating to read rather than enticing and mysterious.

It’s a shame because once I had pushed myself through most of the book, I really did enjoy some of the final sequences before the epilogue, especially the snippets of characters’ lives themed around seasons. They were simple and poignant and so beautiful, but the build-up to them was…. oof. I applaud Cindy Pham’s ambitious debut attempt here, but I found myself wishing she had started with writing short stories. 2/5 stars

God do I love me a good multigenerational family drama