The Rose Code Book Review

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn Book Review

*Warning: This review contains spoilers*

*Content Warning: This review mentions war violence, sexual assault, and the death of a child.* 

Introduction 

It’s fairly rare when I find a new favorite book on audiobook. It’s no shade to audiobooks at all. Just generally I like to own physical copies of the books I’m most excited about, and I save digital titles (audio and ebooks) for titles I’m mildly intrigued by and not 100% sure I’ll love, which is why I don’t buy them. The Rose Code has definitely becomes an exception, as I really loved it. 

Loosely inspired by true events and historical figures, though with some liberties on Kate Quinn’s parts to literature-ize the story, and set during WWII, focusing on female historical heroines, The Rose Code is in a similar vein to The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Actually, I dare say that I think this book might be better. Primarily because this book didn’t feature a cringy love story with a nazi and because Kate Quinn actually adds an author’s note at the end specifying the creative liberties she’s taken with the story. 

Summary & Review 

The Rose Code features the stories of three women: Osla Kendall (who is loosely inspired by the real life Osla Benning), Beth Finch (who is an amalgamation of real life women), and Mab, who is entirely fictional. 

One of the best parts of this story is just watching these three women build friendships with each other and defy stereotypes from the 1940s era. Like Osla, who was often just disregarded by society as a silly socialite whose only claim to anything was being the girlfriend of Prince Phillip, but she actually proves to be smart, strong, and resilient, and all of those things coexist with her femininity. Osla doesn’t feel the need to be un-feminine in order to show her strength and rise to the occasion of any challenge put before her, and Quinn never feels the need to show her as unemotional, “masculine,” or detached from love and sex to show Osla’a strength. She’s feminine and emotional and very, very strong. 

That being said, I think the character who actually got the strongest storyline in this book is Mab—at least, it was her storyline that made me feel the most while reading it. Mab is initially portrayed as the opposite of Osla towards the beginning of the story. She’s less traditionally feminine, seen as more imposing, she comes from a lower class family, and she often closes herself off to emotions and others, and especially to love. But Quinn isn’t using all these stereotypes to try and enforce the false idea that women have to be “masculine” and unfeeling to be strong women; rather she’s using them to show how society has kind of outcasted Mab as womanly and forced her into this role. Because society valued a certain specific type of beauty that Mab didn’t conform with, and she didn’t have money to be a socialite, and of course, the sexual assault she faced as a teenager (and a pregnancy by the man who orchestrated it that she was forced to conceal) is what caused Mab to close herself off from others (especially men). 

That’s also why it’s so wonderful to see Mab’s character growth as we watch her fall in love (twice) and build a family, and really she just comes into her own and learns to accept herself. It also makes the Coventry twist in the story all the more painful (in the best possible way) to read. 

Long story short, Mab gets essentially a dream come true—she falls in love with a man named Francis and gets married, he accepts Lucy (her daughter raised as her sister) as Mab’s child, and wants them all to move into his home in Coventry together after the war. He even buys Lucy a pair of riding boots because he knows she loves horses and Irene’s to teach her how to ride someday. It’s all so wholesome and heartwarming. That is until Coventry gets bombed by the Germans during their visit to the town.

I’ll give Quinn this—she certainly knew how to amp up the emotional devastation of this moment. Mab, Osla, Francis, and Lucy all manage to survive the actual bombing itself, even after Lucy runs off into the night to retrieve her new riding boots and can’t be found. But then… the following morning after it seems that the coast is clear and the relief is settling in, Francis goes to carry Lucy out of the house she was hiding in, and the damaged wall falls and crushes them both. 

It. Is. Devastating. 

It’s a true testament to Quinn’s literary talent—to force her readers to feel the fear of the bombing, then the relief of everyone making it out alive, and then to rip it all away. I felt it all. And I think the reason this really adds something to the overall story is because of the nature of this being a war story. Quinn is clearly showing the devastation of war and war crimes. It’s one thing to show a bombing from up in the air, where the bombs are being dropped, and quite another to show it from the ground where victims are suffering and where survivors have to deal with the aftermath. It’s also an effective way of showing that the horror of war and violence doesn’t just magically vanish the moment that the violence itself ends. The aftermath can be long-lasting, and in some cases, even more tragic. That’s exactly what Quinn is showing here. The bombing itself may be over, but the town is still destroyed. It’s dangerous. People die in the aftermath—people like Francis and Lucy—and they are victims too, as much as those who died when the bombs dropped. 

It also does a lot for Mab’s character development. In the chapters set in the future, we see that Mab is remarried and has two children. She’s clearly still traumatized from the loss of Francis and Lucy, but we can still see her growth. She hasn’t closed herself off from ever feeling or loving again like the way she was at the story’s beginning. She’ll always love and mourn Francis and Lucy, but she’s allowed herself to continue her life and love again. The loss hasn’t taken away her ability to live life, which really shows just how far Mab has come. Some readers may not enjoy seeing time devoted to giving Mab two husbands, or might feel like this is her “replacement” family, but I disagree. I think it’s good to show how far she’s come, how she’s able to cope and heal and keep living. I certainly enjoy it more than I would have enjoyed watching Mab curl into a ball, give up on life, and spiritually die alongside Francis and Lucy. 

I also think using something like the Coventry bombing as the climax of this story was unique. Most stories set during WWII usually climax out at the end of the war, when Germany is defeated and Hitler is dead. But this story chose to center its climax on a major event that was more central to the main characters. Having the story’s peak at Germany’s defeat wouldn’t have really done much for the arcs of any of the three major characters. Plus, it allowed Quinn to incorporate the huge major twist that Bletchley Park’s code breakers actually cracked the message warning that Coventry was going to be bombed and didn’t evacuate the city—because it couldn’t have been evacuated on time. But what makes it worse is that Beth is the one who deciphered the message and did not even give the slightest warning to her friends that they shouldn’t go to Coventry. 

Herein lies the biggest flaw of the novel for me, which was the handling of Beth’s character. Beth started out as a character to root for—an underdog with an abusive mother, trying to get out from under her thumb and establish herself with her own identity, becoming the greatest code-breaker at Bletchley Park. We feel bad because we know she gets unfairly institutionalized to silence her in the future. And she does grow and come into her own, and spread her wings so to speak, as the story continues. But I feel that Quinn really botched the finer points in her character arc. The romance with Harry was odd but overall fine, I guess. He’s married, but in an open relationship with his wife (as they’re only staying together for the sake of their son). I guess this unconventional relationship dynamic shows how Beth is just no longer caring what others think of her, so it’s fine, I guess. It’s just an odd setup. But what I really had an issue with wasn’t the Harry-romance, it was her involvement with the Coventry cipher. 

The twist is that Beth deciphered the German message that warned that Coventry was going to be bombed and… did nothing, didn’t even warn her dear friends Osla and Mab when they were departing for a visit to Coventry. Her reasoning just being that it was against their oath of silence to talk about their work or spread information throughout the park. But, she didn’t have to tell them what she decoded. She could have just told them not to go, and they probably would have taken her at her word because they knew she was a code-breaker. And they had snuck each other sneaky messages of warning before, so her reasoning this time doesn’t really make sense. If anything, it goes against her character development. Beth went from being a stringent rule-follower who never did anything for herself to becoming more free and unbothered by what people thought of her. By this point in the story, she should have been more likely to break the rules to save her friends, not less. It just makes Beth seem callous and unlikable. 

I get that Quinn needed this umph in the plot twist to set up the rest of the story, but she definitely could have gone about it in a way that wouldn’t have completely made Beth any likable protagonist moving forward. Like if she hadn’t deciphered the message until after Mab and Osla had already left for Coventry, so there was no way to warn them (what with the story taking place in a pre-cell phone time). It would have been awful and tragic and still could have setup the bad blood between Osla and Mab with Beth, but in a way that deep down wouldn’t have really been her fault because there literally would have been nothing she could have done to stop it or warn them. And then the reader could still go on empathizing with her character. In a way, this would have been more tragic. The idea that Beth knew sudden destruction was coming for her friends and was absolutely powerless to stop it. Honestly, I would have enjoyed that more. 

It also would have made the ending a little more effective too. By the end of the novel, once we reach the present day, Mab admits that she doesn’t know if she can ever forgive Beth and Osla for what happened to Lucy, but implies that she still loves them, and they all share a fond group hug before agreeing not to be strangers. This works for Osla and Mab’s relationship. Quinn did a good job of crafting a scenario for Osla where it was easy to understand how Mab would blame her, would continue to associate Osla with Lucy’s death, but that deep down wasn’t really Osla’s fault. Osla was holding Lucy’s arm, Lucy wrenched free, and took off. Ultimately, Osla couldn’t have known that Lucy would have broken free from her grasp, or even that her grasp wasn’t tight enough on the girl. It was an awful, tragic thing that happened, but Osla didn’t do anything malicious that directly resulted in what happened. 

But Beth did… she knew Coventry would be bombed and let Osla, Mab, and Mab’s family go anyway. Which is why it’s so unrealistic that Mab could even just the slightest bit stool feel any fondness towards her. 

Final Thoughts 

That’s my biggest complaint about the book, but everything else is pretty good. I also have to shoutout the little “Bletchley Blatherings” interludes. They added a certain amount of charm to the story. I’d rate this 4 out of 5 stars.