#rottenheart

How delicious it was to get swallowed whole by this story. I was completely enchanted by Kat Dunn's prose from the very beginning and how you could feel Odette's despair at every turn.

This is indeed a love story and how love can be turned into pure and raw madness that will get you to a point where you will do anything, including to kill. And yet, at the same time, love is also salvation, it is the one thing that undid Odette but also put her back together.

Throughout the entire book, I was completely consumed by Odette's anger and pain, her uncertainties, and her overwhelming love for Cecilia. I can say with enough confidence that Kat Dunn made a good job into transferring to ROTTENHEART the spine that carried Hamlet and that you will find joy in reading this sapphic reimagining.

Review:

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC!

I went into this expecting something darker: a revenge story with more overt horror elements. While revenge is a large part of the story, Rottenheart turned out to be a slower-paced character portrait exploring the complexities of grief.

The prose is lovely and perfectly captures the gothic atmosphere of the story. The format is more experimental than I had expected; the book is split into parts, with each part taking place in different times, jumping around in a non-chronological order. I'll admit I wasn't the biggest fan of this. It created some confusion initially, as I had to go back and check the dates of previous parts, and I felt it took some of the tension out of the story, especially when returning to events that took place before Odette's mother died. However, I absolutely loved the epistolary sections of the book, between Odette and Cecilia. There are only a couple of those, but they give a lot of insight into their relationship and how they communicated to (or what they concealed from) each other.

I found this portrayal of grief fascinating. Odette's relationship with her mother is complicated. She resented her mother's temperamental moods and clinginess, but after her death, Odette grieved her deeply and obsessively. I feel like, besides Odette's relationship with her mother, the other relationships aren't necessarily portrayed with the same amount of nuance, with some of the characters being depicted as unsympathetic antagonists. While some things aren't explained too much, I feel the book does suffer from over-explaining, specifically with Odette's aunt, Claudine. Claudine's motivations are explained outright to the reader, when sufficient (in my opinion) information is provided for the reader to come to those conclusions themselves.

I didn't enjoy this book much while reading it, I think perhaps because it didn't line up with my expectations. But looking back, I can appreciate this book for what it is, and for what it's trying to do.

Content warnings:

Death, violence

Emotional abuse, sexual abuse, incest

Sexual harrassment

Suffocation, strangulation

Drowning