The Rose Bargain
The Rose Bargain
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Sasha Peyton Smith on The Rose Bargain
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A silly idea at the dinner tableThe book began not with ambition but with collapse. In the fall of 2022, Smith had finished touring the Witch Haven duology and was, by her own account, facing the biggest failure of her career. For months she ate gummy worms for dinner, watched too much television, and genuinely believed she would never write again. The idea arrived in December, at the holidays, catching her completely off guard.
I was sitting at the dinner table, when the thought what if the Queen of England was a fairy fell into my lap. It was such a silly idea, I nearly dismissed it.
She didn’t dismiss it. Instead, that night, looking at the childhood bookshelf bowed with books she’d read past her bedtime and made her sister read so she’d have someone to discuss them with, she resolved to write one last project for her fifteen-year-old self. The permission she gave herself was rooted in the logic of someone who had nothing left to lose.
I was wondering if a book even could give me those feelings again.
What followed was the most deliberately self-indulgent writing project of her career. She threw in every trope she had ever loved, making no attempt to write something defensible. The result answered the question she had brought to the page.
In so many ways, the Rose Bargain brought me back to life. It reminded me that books could be sources of joy. Honestly, it felt a lot like falling in love.
That recovery was not incidental to the book’s shape. A novel written to rediscover joy reads differently from one written to meet expectations, and Smith has been candid that the two motivations produce different books.
How she wrote it
Old myths, rotten veneers, and the terror of magic systemsThe world of the book was built from a specific cultural inheritance. Smith grew up between the United States and her mother’s English family, which gave her access to an older, darker tradition of fae mythology than the romanticized versions that dominate contemporary fantasy. She saw what that tradition could do when placed against Victorian London’s particular kind of performance.
I’m from the States, but my mother’s family is English, so I grew up with old-school faerie myths, where fae were portrayed as uncanny and malicious. Combining these fae characters who are driven by impulse and cruelty with the buttoned-up, sparkling world of 1800s London was such a fun push and pull. Both the faeries and high-society England have shiny veneers that hide something rotten underneath.
The Queen of Faerie, the book’s central antagonist and power structure, required a psychological logic that Smith found in a feeling she has described as genuine personal dread: the horror of immortality. She worked through what centuries of existence would erode in a person, and arrived at an answer that became the character’s engine.
Above all things, the immortal queen is bored, and that was such a fun place to build a character from.
Smith writes every scene in sequence, never skipping ahead. The tropes were assembled deliberately before writing began, but every scene was earned chronologically. That method has a cost: the most anticipated moments require her to write through everything that precedes them first. It also has a reward she has described with some glee.
I might be a fantasy writer but I don’t consider myself a Fantasy writer. I love magic spells and fairy queens, but I’ve always approached my novels with one foot firmly in the real world. Scaffolding, I liked to call it.
Victorian London served as exactly that scaffolding for The Rose Bargain, giving the magic a familiar historical architecture to push against. When she wrote the sequel, set in the Otherworld itself, that anchor was gone entirely, and she has spoken about how much harder the magic became to construct without it.
Even with the real-world scaffolding in place, building a magic system remained the part of the process she liked least. This is a recurring admission across her interviews, not false modesty. In a 2026 conversation conducted around the sequel’s release, she was direct about where her instincts fail her.
For being a fantasy writer, writing magic systems is like the most intimidating part of my job. It’s not something that comes naturally to me and it’s not something I love doing.
The competition structure at the book’s center, where girls are pitted against one another for the queen’s favor, was never going to remain antagonistic. Smith couldn’t write it any other way. The friendship between competitors was, for her, where the story was always heading, and the reason lives in something she said in the Pinereads interview about where she has always found her closest emotional bonds.
In my life, women have always been my biggest supporters and the biggest source of emotional intimacy, especially when I was young.
What she wants us to sit with
Joy as argument, sisters as stakesThe book’s recovery story is also its thesis. Smith has described The Rose Bargain as a study in joy from conception to completion, and what she wants readers to carry is not the plot but the feeling the plot is built to produce. She names the genre’s central claim as the one she had to earn back through writing the book.
The Rose Bargain was a study in joy from the get.
The sister relationship between protagonist Ivy and her sister Lydia carries the most personal weight in the book. Smith has said she poured herself into Ivy specifically through that bond, and when asked what she hoped readers would take from the duology, she collapsed a large argument into a short either/or.
I poured a lot of myself into Ivy, especially regarding the deep love she has for her sister Lydia.
The takeaway she offers readers sits between the romantic and the familial, and she has stated it in two registers: a grand claim and a practical instruction.
Love is always worth it, or, be nice to your sister!
Underneath the tropes and the Victorian setting and the fae mythology, Smith has located a single observation about what writing and love share. She made it in the Barnes and Noble essay where she also described the book’s origin, and it functions as the quiet center of everything she has said about why this project mattered.
The greatest thing about writing and love are the same—the best bits take you by surprise.
She came to that conclusion after a career crisis she believed was permanent. The surprise, in her case, was the book itself.