Elsie is strong, independent woman living in South London trying to make it as a poet. Elsie spends her days writing poetry and working at a hole in the wall bar to help try to make ends meet until she can make a full living with her poetry. When Elsie is evicted from her apartment she’s forced to move in with her best friend Juliet. Living with Juliet, Elsie starts to wonder if what’s she’s starting to feel for Juliet is more than just friendship. As Juliet starts a relationship, Elsie feelings continue to grow and as weeks turn into months, she starts to wonder where things could go with Juliet. The problem is that Juliet expressed her feelings to Elsie months before she moved in and Elsie basically ghosted Juliet and ignored her feelings. Now faced with the dilemma of telling Juliet her true feelings, or continue to sleep around with beautiful girls making no real connections.
Fans of Queenie would probably really enjoy this book. #lgbtqia
Thank you Get Lifted and NetGalley for this ARC.

I love messy books and messy characters and this was fantastic!

The characters were well written and I really loved the MC.

Powerful and engaging.

This was definitely a unique and bold book, though I couldn't quite get into it, unfortunately. Maybe I was simply distracted, but it did feel very slow paced for me, though the premise was very intriguing and relevant.

This is a coming of age story as Elsie is still trying to navigate life and figure things out. Elsie is just looking for the basics – a steady job and a place to live. She struggles with people constantly telling her that some choices are simple, but it isn’t that easy or straightforward for her. She is looking for support since she is scared of being rejected. She is anxious and unsure how she should handle things when it comes to friendships and relationships. She has a lot of feelings but is also closed off, as if she has blinders on. This book is about friendship and relationships and how those two things can be very complicated. It is also about love – how it's expressed, how people give and and how people receive it since it’s different for everyone. There is also some really beautiful poetry in this book!

I wasn’t totally into the book, it was definitely intriguing in the beginning which kept me going but overall it was enjoyable

I really enjoyed this book! I went into this book blind and I must say I am glad I gave it a chance. I especially loved the diversity and lgbtqia+ representation. A few tropes in this book is friends to lovers, forced proximity, love triangle and miscommunication. I would definitely recommend!

a genre i will always love and adore is literary fiction (women's fiction) in particular that explores characters navigating life with a love story on the side, and this was one of them. such a beautiful book.

Well, this one was a pleasant surprise. Billed as a cross between Queenie and Such A Fun Age, this is a contemporary novel set in London with Elsie, a 28-year-old woman who can't seem to get her life together. The book opens with a cringe-worthy scene of her mortification at being evicted with her latest conquest still in her bed. She was happy and felt buzzy about the night spent with the woman, but was quickly faced with reality as she had to grab a few things (she doesn't own too much) and find a place to stay. She isn't able to hold onto jobs. She is only really skilled at wooing women and only cares about her best friend and writing poetry. But her best friend just admitted feeling for her, and her poetry isn't going anywhere.

What sounds like a depressing start ended up being a frustrating read as we watch Elsie make poor decisions, but we also see her community invest in her and her potential. We see her complicated family dynamics but love for her grandmother, who is a shining ray of love in her life. And we see her learn about those who came before her in the London lesbian community.

I liked this book and hope people will pick it up, knowing it had a lot of pre-publication buzz.

I want to thank the publisher for giving me access to an advanced reader's copy in exchange for a fair review.

*I received an advance copy of this book from Net Galley.

More intergenerational queer novels, please! I quickly consumed this novel, Rosewater, written by Liv Little; I couldn't put it down. Elsie is such a realistic character. As we move through her relationships, experiences, and discoveries, it's so easy to understand, feel, and relate to what's going on in her life. Little has crafted something very special here that, queer or not, will feel incredibly relatable to many people.

(One thing I did keep thinking about throughout is that this book, in some regards, felt like what Florence Given wanted "Girl Crush" to sound/feel like. (Disclaimer: I am a hugeeeee fan of Florence and her videos and non-fiction writing, but her novel fell flat for me.) While, to a certain degree, an increase in representation of queer relationships in fiction books is huge and important in any way, I'm the type of person who can get irritated if things don't feel real/authentic or as if someone is trying too hard. That's where Given misstepped for me, where as Little succeeded with flying colors.)

Thank you #Netgalley for the copy!

This was a fun read about Elsie who is down on her luck and forced to re-examine her life after she is evicted from her home, loses her job and must put her life back together. She has a love of writing poetry but has never been able to make a living out of it. We watch Elsie slowly grow up, face her fears, confront her relationships and so much more.

i truly loved this book! funny, yet touching at times, relatable in at least some way for probably anyone in their 20s. also im so here for gay friends to lovers!

This book was really beautifully written as a whole. Though I hate the overly climactic third act, causes me anxiety.

I almost DNFed this book at the 8% and 20% marks. I just wasn’t hooked! But then I got into it little by little and wow, I was completely captivated. the romance part of the book was rly just a bonus. it’s rly a book about friendship and how precious it is when a friendship turns into a romance.

Beautifully written.

I really enjoyed the poems throughout and the overall message of the story being told but I just felt like it was a bit too slice of life for my taste. I was really moved by Elsie feeling like she can never get what she wants and when she finally tries to, it’s too late. I resonate with her on that. I just didn’t feel the emotions I felt like I was supposed to be feeling while reading.

This felt to me exactly like opening a window into someone else’s life. I’ve experienced none of the things Elise has, her world is as foreign to me as the moon. We are as opposite as opposite can be, me with my privilege, her with her disadvantages. And yet none of this blocked my empathy, my deep realisation of humanity, and my absolute determination to see her work things out.

There’s a lot to unpack here - Little explores sexuality, community, oppression, generational trauma, the complexities of love and friendship. Hell, she even goes into the impact of Karens. But we’re given these themes in such a slow, true to life way. As one thing happens, just adding to the pile of situations to handle or process, it was clear to me how realistic this was. Life doesn’t hand us something and allow us to deal with it before ploughing us with the next one. We juggle everything, all of the time.

I loved experiencing all of these characters with their deep, sometimes secluded, histories. Everyone has selfish motivations, and seeing them connect, repel, and heal, was wonderful.

Although slow in places, and sometimes feeling plotless, I think this is a wonderful debut and I’m eager to read what comes next.

I absolutely loved this book. Not only was it incredibly honest and forthright about what it wanted to be. It was beautifully written and the messages of being who you are, finding yourself, Black queerness were topics that I love having explored in books. Liv Little did a great job here and I’ll definitely be waiting for her next book!

In Rosewater, we follow the story of Elsie, a queer 28-year-old struggling to make a living, while also trying to make something of herself as a poet.

I really enjoyed how very queer this book is, especially with the inclusion of older queer characters, which isn't something I get to read about often in fiction.
And I loved that the author included actual poetry in the book. That really helped in solidifying Elsie's identity as a poet for me.

Over the years, I've read quite a few novels about young adults feeling lost in life and messily trying to find their way, and I haven't loved most of them. I think Rosewater is my favorite one so far.
Rosewater has been compared to Queenie and Such A Fun Age, and there are certainly similarities with Queenie, but less so with Such A Fun Age, in my opinion.
Elsie is a more mature, less messy version of the "lost young adult" archetype, and I think that's why I liked Rosewater more than the other iterations of this kind of novel that I've read.

Here are some other novels I think are similar to Rosewater, that might prompt you to pick it up:

- Queenie by Candice-Carty Williams
- Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
- Writers and Lovers by Lily King
- Luster by Raven Leilani

✨ Thank you to Liv Little, the publisher Zando Projects, and NetGalley, for providing me with an advance electronic copy of this novel, in exchange for my honest review. ✨

Rosewater oscillates between tenderness and distress and captures both emotions beautifully. The first-person narrator, Elsie, is a lesbian, Londoner of Guyanese descent, and a poet. She struggles with employment, housing, her relationship with her family, and expressing love. The novel explores all these not just through Elsie but also those around her.

One of the key relationships explored through the novel is between Elsie and her best friend, Juliet. Juliet is a schoolteacher and cam girl who confessed she was in love with Elsie. Elsie takes about half the novel to realize she is in love with Juliet, too. What I liked best about their relationship was how genuine it was. They love each other, as friends if not lovers, and support each other. Juliet gives Elsie a place to live and urges her to pursue her poetry. Elsie never judges Juliet for her sex work and drops everything when she needs help, even when they are fighting.

I also appreciated the three poems included in the book. Sometimes you read a book about an artist, and you don’t get to ‘see’ why they are good or talented. Little takes the time to include excellent poems, amazing in themselves, but also uses each poem to tell us something crucial about Elsie as a character.

The main character, Elsie, had me yelling at my book “Girl what is you doing?!?” many times, but you can’t help but root for her. I think many young people can connect with Elise even if they aren’t in her exact situation.

You have a character in her late twenties who doesn’t have everything figured out and is feeling pretty lost in many ways— relationships, career, and purpose. These are things that I myself have felt being in my late twenties. This comes to a head when Elsie is evicted. I wouldn’t approach a lot of this journey the same way Elsie did and that’s okay! We also see other people in her circle such as her best friend Juliet, coworkers, people in the poetry scene, and her family all dealing with life and the various things it throws at them.

I think that’s what made this book a little difficult to follow. Elsie is on a journey and that journey is all over the place. This of course is accurate for real life but is difficult to read in a book because the plot is disorganized.

I was personally annoyed with the climax situation. It seemed like a cop-out to bring Elsie to the conclusion she needed to make about one of her relationships.

Regardless, this is an interesting read that I maybe wouldn’t recommend to everyone, but I would recommend it to someone who finds themselves in a similar time of their life to the main character.

Rosewater is a stunning debut. Following our main character Elsie, a queer poet and bartender getting evicted. This event is just a culmination of Elsie's already chaotic home life ever since she was a teenager. Luckily for her, Juliet, her described more stable friend, is more than happy to let her live with her until things get better. Immediately this book captures the early twenties feeling of what to do with my life, coupled with being a person of color. The representation and characterization of every person in this novel is absolutely lovely! My only issues with the narrative are that certain plot points felt disjointed and unnecessary (like the dad being a cheater, had no effect on the plot). The writing at times felt a little slow as well. Rosewater is an incredible debut novel and I can't wait to see what else Liv Little does with her writing in the future!