Wild Beauty Book Review

This is a story about so many things: family, truth, understanding. To extend on that, it's a story about how stories have the power to be damaging when they're built on a foundation of lies. It's a story about the ability of one person, and one family, to take back agency and control of their own story. It's a story about all kinds of love, across all times and spaces. It's a story about how land and people affect one another, and how they'll always be in opposition if they don't work together to tell the correct story. It's a story about women upholding a burden they didn't deserve, but did anyways. But most of all, Anna-Marie McLemore, with Wild Beauty, gave us a story that we can all learn and grow from. 

Anna-Marie McLemore is the author of fairy tales that are as queer, Latinx, and nonbinary as they are. Their books include The Weight of Feathers, a 2016 William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist; 2017 Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, which was also longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature; Wild Beauty, a Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Booklist best book of 2017; Blanca & Roja, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; Dark and Deepest Red, a Winter 2020 Indie Next List selection; and the forthcoming The Mirror Season. McLemore also has short stories that appear in anthologies, and a scattering of non-fiction essays. You can find Anna-Marie McLemore at author.annamariemclemore.com. If you're interested in more of my reviews of their work, you can find them all here. 

In Wild Beauty, McLemore introduces a spellbinding setting and two characters drawn together by fate--and pulled apart by truth. For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They've also hidden a tragic legacy: If they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishing, a strange boy appears in the gardens--a boy neither Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, nor her family know anything about. The Nomeolvides grandmothers treat him like a lost son. The Nomeolvides mothers hope he's a sign that their vanished loves might reappear. Estrella's cousins worry his presence is a warning that none of them yet understands. But however much the boy is an enigma to them, he's even more of a mystery to himself; all he knows about who he is or where he came from is the first three letters of his name. As Estrella tries to help Fel piece together his unknown past, La Pradera leads them to secrets as dangerous as they are magical in this stunning exploration of love, loss, and family. 

Estrella Nomeolvides is an outsider in her own family -- that much is apparent by her lack of a flower-inspired name. Her cousins are a little wary of her, and yet welcome her to their dinner table every night. Estrella's character is a study in subtle contrasts: most notably, her ability to self-hate while also trying to regain agency of herself is one of the best character arcs of the story. Estrella believes herself to not be as flawed as she thinks, and readers believe this because (in combination with McLemore's lush prose) we don't get much in depth to Estrella's character until later on in the story. The front quarter-to-half of the novel is spent solely on world-building and understanding the dynamics of the Nomeolvides women in the face of the entrance of Fel. Once Estrella starts having realizations about the greater mess she and her family are in, she starts to have realizations about herself. This is such a relatable part of Estrella's character, because a lot of us can admit to overlooking our faults in the face of tragedy and/or excitement. It is when we come face-to-face with these faults that we have to make the decisions that have the power to change our lives -- that's why it's so interesting that she's able to hate herself and her mistakes, and yet regain agency of herself by regaining control of a story that was so often out of her hands. There is great commentary to be found here, and while it's difficult to articulate while remaining spoiler-free, these aspects of Estrella's character make up a great part of how the story takes its course. 

The story is narrated entirely in third-person, with chapters switching back-and-forth between Estrella and Fel. I found this to be an effective way to world-build, because it allowed readers to see the Nomeolvides girls from the inside (through Estrella) and from the outside (from Fel). At first, I wondered how Fel would be an interesting character to see the side of the story from, seeing as how he has no memory of his past life, but this allowed the story to be surprisingly, delightfully suspenseful. In the summary (above), we're made to believe that the only thing we're waiting to figure out is the story of Fel's past, and how it explicitly affects the Nomeolvides women. Instead, it turns out to be much bigger than that. Early on in the book, events escalate quickly, which are all slowed down by the need to world-build, character-build, and maintain a steady and readable pace. It turns out that these events are all purposefully designed to march readers towards a few grand reveals. We're waiting for all these multiple reveals to take place, and before you know it, you've been reading on the edge of your seat waiting for multiple answers. Readers have the ability to become so invested in the story without realizing it, because it's easy to fall into McLemore's lush prose, the relatable character narratives, and the overall plot. 

McLemore is well-known for their incredibly lush, descriptive prose. If their style had a "staple," it would be that. Their imagery is some of the best description I've ever read, which makes this book highly engaging and readable. It's the kind of concentrated description that forces the reader to slow down and take in the words, which makes this book more impactful in the end. McLemore sets the standard for Wild Beauty's lush prose early on -- in fact, there's hardly any extended dialogue or conversations in the earliest parts in the book. For that reason, the lush prose and the increased amount of dialogue in the back-half of the book was jarring to me. Many of the gorgeous descriptions clashed with the dialogue vernacular (such as "wanna, gotta"), which at times took me out of the story. That being said, I think this clash was purposeful, in a way that, while jarring, was useful to my understanding of the story being one of contrasts. The vernacular also helped keep the characters relatable as the magical realism aspects of the plot thickened -- after all, the Nomeolvides cousins are still teenage girls, who live in a modern, if magical, world. 

One of my personal favorite narratives to this story was the one about realizing how the people you love aren't icons or figureheads, but how they're also people with flaws and backstories as twisted as our own. This was such a powerful narrative to understand, especially since I think a lot of us struggle with recognizing this fact. Whether it be our parents we think are "perfect" or the people we interact with on social media, it's easy to fall into the trap of applying our misconceptions onto someone else, and expect them to conform with that. In my opinion, this was one of the best narratives and themes of the novel. This theme also relied heavily on the theme of family, seeing as how the 5 Nomeolvides cousins were guilty of this behavior. The dynamics between the Nomeolvides girls were another contrast: the bonds were indestructible and withstood all the storms, and yet the bonds were also flexible and fragile. The five cousins learn this about themselves as the story develops, and that's how they find themselves learning about what love truly means, and the space love needs to grow and flourish. Overall, this story was full of many beautifully complex themes, and provided me with an overflowing amount of new perspective about the world around me. 

If you loved Wild Beauty, and this review, then stick around for McLemore's newest release, Dark and Deepest Red. Find my review here!

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*