Rose/House by Arkady Martine

TL;DR: I’m not smart enough for this story but I enjoyed it regardless.
Source: NetGalley – Thank you so much to the publisher!

Plot: A murder in an unbreachable house with it’s own AI personality. It’s a bit creepy and a lot weird.
Characters: The characters, outside the house’s own, are fairly shallow but work well in their roles. No one to connect to too intensely.
Setting: The inside of Rose House is bewitching and creepy, and setting it in a desert adds a whole level of uncomfortable.
Science Fiction: The SF elements in this were not too much a stretch which added to the creep factor here.

Thoughts:

Rose House is an sealed off tomb. Within it the last works of a world renown architect are hidden away, with the diamond remains of his body. His Archivist, the only person allowed into the house hates him and the house, and is no where near when the AI that runs the home calls in remains of a murdered man inside the house.

There is a lot to unpack in this story as far as possible ideas and what the author may have been exploring. It’s short and I think perhaps it doesn’t manage to convey everything it wants to. The characters are a bit flat, in fact I found myself confused on why we had certain characters doing things. Did we need the second detective? I don’t think so. The AI as a character as well felt as if it would hit us with a big moral or story or statement but it ultimately… did not.

There seemed to have been ideas of what AI would want vs what we project upon it. I also wonder about the idea of personhood in the story, and if that was a theme we were looking to explore. Overall I do think it needed more work. I loved the writing, the idea, that all was great. But the actual execution? That perhaps was lacking for me.