The book opens with Elsie Macintosh being evicted by bailiffs from her tiny flat and things get worse from there. It's fair to say that Elsie is living a chaotic life, bouncing from partner to partner, drinking too much, losing a job and finding floors to sleep on where she can. Her friend of last resort is Juliet who gives her a room while she tries to get her life together.
Elsie is also a performance poet but she seems determined to mess up that area of her life as well. It's all a bit of a car crash and she's not very good working out who to trust and who really likes her.
There are some good characters in the world where Elsie hangs out and it's well described as a place where people do what they have to do in order to survive but there are always risks and when Juliet's part-time job is exposed things come to a climax, as you might say.
In the end, everything turns out all right but it's been a chaotic journey and, although it's a gay one, it's the same old story about a helpless and chaotic young woman systematically messing up her own life by bad decisions and choices who becomes good, maybe even saved, in the end. But then, that's Jane Austen isn't it?
(Rosewater is published by Dialogue Books. Thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advance copy.)
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