Rosie Price’s debut novel, What Red Was, won a place on the Observer’s best debuts list in 2019. If her second, The Orange Room, hints at an arching rainbow of titles, let me be flip and say I’m looking forward to yellow. The more profound thread in Price’s work, however, is its dissection of the relationships between sex and power, men and women: What Red Was dealt with the aftermath of a rape, while The Orange Room slowly unravels a toxic affair. Price is concerned with the murkiness of the everyday – her narrative is slow, quiet, the stakes understated until you realise with a shudder how much our heroine has been eroded by a controlling partner.
Rhianne is a 23-year-old art student, who’s dropped out after her teacher, Alexander, made a move and then threatened to fail her when she didn’t reciprocate. Price writes the greyish areas: Rhianne is both attracted to and repulsed by this older man; she goes for cocktails, gets in the cab, and afterwards feels ashamed for entertaining his interest even to that extent. Price is astute, too, on how Rhianne’s belief in her own talent is tarnished once she realises how fake Alexander’s admiration was; that he only praised her work when he thought she might sleep with him.
