Brittany Cavallaro is the author of the New York Times bestselling Charlotte Holmes series, Muse, and the poetry collection Girl-King and the coauthor of Hello Girls. She earned her BA in literature from Middlebury College and her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Michigan. Find her at her website, www.brittanycavallaro.com, or on Twitter @skippingstones. You can find more of my reviews of Brittany's work here.
St. Cloud has fallen. And Claire Duchamp is fighting to hold on to the seat of power in exile while her new husband, Governor Remy Duchamp, lingers at death's door. Claire has always been under a man's thumb, but now she's on her own, circled by dangerous enemies. Like General Montgomery, who has seized the capital of St. Cloud and now waits to unseat the Duchamps once and for all. When King Augustus Washington of the First American Kingdom comes to St. Cloud to determine who to support, Claire schemes to get him on her side. After years of playing her father's muse, Claire knows how to deal with powerful men. But the King has the kind of power even Claire must navigate carefully. When her plan backfires, Claire falls into the hands of General Montgomery. He's decided to put her in her place: on Adams Island. In name, Adams Island is a sanatorium. Truly, it's a prison, a place to hide difficult and powerful women. But there are secrets there as well, secrets Claire can use to secure her future and to topple the monarchy. Because Claire realizes that there's no option for her safety—or that of her fellow citizens—under the King's rule. And her best choice might be to burn it all down. This explosive conclusion to the duology by New York Times bestselling author Brittany Cavallaro is a finale filled with the power of overlooked women, the hope of a nation, and the strength of one girl who isn't anyone's muse.
Muse and Manifest, more than anything, are about power. Who holds power, who is allowed to have power, who can grab for power, what even is power are all questions examined in this duology. Claire, a character who is powerless for much of the novel, is a very interesting one to narrate the story. Brittany Cavallaro explained in her launch party with Brilliant Books to Emily Henry that choosing to have the camera ride along on Claire's shoulder was one of the many ways she demonstrated Claire's own disenfranchisement with her story—she is powerless to even trust her own voice to be the narrator. After having reached for power, Manifest tells an entirely different part of the story—now that you have some semblance of power, how do you hang onto it and grab for more? Claire finds her way in this second novel, and it does take a minute. But once she gets there, her decisions and her path towards power is incredibly compelling, and much, much different than the YA norm. For that reason, I believe Manifest, and thus the duology as a whole, to be an incredibly important story to the YA narrative.
Even if I didn't hear Brittany describe all the fun she'd had in writing this novel, I would have felt it based on all the fun references and tropes she employs throughout the narrative. In addition to the fun and understated Beauty and the Beast retelling element from Muse, Cavallaro employs the use of insane asylums, seances and mediums, and vintage baseball to craft the second half of Claire's story. Some of my favorite references were to Frankenstein and the Browning poems, to the way Manifest itself feels as dark as Victorian novels where men lock their women in attics without feeling as ghastly (or maybe feeling just as ghastly, but in a different way). As someone who personally loves Victorian literature, I definitely got strong Victorian vibes from this part of the book, and I adored it. All of it definitely made me wonder just how deeply we are linked to literature, and how different countries respond to the same types of cultural phenomena. If you love Victorian under/overtones to your books, I think you should add this duology to your list.
My favorite part of Brittany Cavallaro's writing is how she crafts truly complicated characters and relationships. A lot of what goes on between people, in her books, happens in minute details—details so small they can be hard to miss, but details that encapsulate the entire relationship so perfectly. Claire is having trouble with two of her relationships over the course of Manifest—her marriage with Remy, and her friendship with Beatrix. Both of them start out pretty rocky based on the ending of Muse, and we spend a lot of time in Claire's head, understanding her frustration with the people closest to her. To remain spoiler-free, I won't dive much deeper than this, only to say: I love and appreciate how forgiveness does not come easily to Claire, and that she holds grudges, or holds the inability to understand Remy's and Beatrix's motivations. I think, even for Claire, it's so easy to get stuck in your own head, or in the belief that your way is the only way, and to see that reflected on the page was incredibly empowering, even though it's (arguably) a bad trait to have. Claire's relationships are complicated because she's complicated, Remy and Beatrix are complicated, and a lot of the devil is in the detail.
I can't wait to see what projects Brittany has in store for the future! Until then, you can find her at her website, www.brittanycavallaro.com, or on Twitter @skippingstones. You can find more of my reviews of Brittany's work here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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