Wild Beauty: A Novel

Anna-Marie McLemore’s Wild Beauty is as complex as it is beautiful. Estrella and her cousins are part of a long legacy of Nomeolvides women who have cultivated the La Pradera gardens for the last century. Flowers bloom and flourish under their fingertips at will, but their enchanting gift is not the only inheritance passed down from mother to daughter. For the Nomeolvides women, their love is a curse upon the men they love. They either watch them disappear, some vanishing right before their lover’s eyes, or watch them walk away, never to be heard from again. When Fel, a mysterious boy, appears in their garden with no memory of who he is, the Nomeolvides women believe his arrival may mean the return of their past lovers. But Fel’s quest to discover who he is will uncover dark truths that will change the Nomeolvides women’s lives forever.McLemore once again dazzles with her storytelling ability. With lush and intimate descriptions, the gardens of La Pradera come to life. The setting is equal parts magical and strange. There is both darkness and light in the Nomeolvides’s world that the author is expert at exploring. The women in Wild Beauty are well-rounded and engaging. I loved how the author let’s the reader learn more about these young women as they learn about themselves. When the novel opens, Estrella and her cousins are desperate to outrun their family curse. Though history says that it is only men that disappear, none of them want to take the risk when it comes to Bay Briar. Bay has been a part of their world forever and ever since she lost her grandmother, who owned the land the Nomeolvides have cared for for generations, they feel even more protective of her. When they all discover that each of them has fallen a little in love with her, they take action, sacrificing their greatest treasures to La Pradera in exchange for Bay’s safety. McLemore focuses on the alienation these young women experience because of their gift, but she also explores how the possibility of finding love can alienate them from one another. It’s a consequence predicated on the idea that love is something that will eventually caused them pain.Fel adds another wrinkle to the story. The ease at which the Nomeolvides women welcome him into their family filled me with so much affection for them. Though sadness is ingrained in their world, it is their love for one another that motivates and drives them. There’s a growing affection between Fel and these women. They care for him like one of their own and he in turn feels the need to protect them. He wants to discover who he is, but there’s a part of him that is afraid of the truth and what this will mean for his relationship with these women. Estrella and her family are an ensemble I’d like to see more often. There are three generations of Nomeolvides women under the same roof who are joined by and large by their shared grief, but are inevitably separated by experience. While the older generations know grief intimately, the younger ones have not yet lost someone they love. The older women have walked this life for decades. They know what it’s like to love and grieve, to watch those closest to them crumble under the weight of loss, and what it’s like to give everything to the land that has both blessed and cursed them. Estrella and her cousins are only beginning to learn what it means to be a part of the Nomeolvides family.Wild Beauty is a multi-layered story that will have readers enthralled from the very first page. McLemore has crafted a novel that devastates readers both with its beauty and sorrow in equal parts. If you’ve never picked up this author’s novels, you are missing out on some of the most profound and stunning writing published in recent years.

Rating: 4/5“Sorrow was a family heirloom, written into their blood like ink of a will.”It all starts with the Nomeolvides, a family of las hijas del aire (daughters air), derived from a people who are nomadic out of boundaries drawn in their original homeland. These cousins, mothers, grandmothers share the gift of growing from their very hands and feet, sunken deep into the earth. As nomadic people with rare gifts, they are prone to receiving prejudice. Women who struggle to control their gift out of misuse have a history of being called witches and at times outright murdered by the fear of others.“Because falling in love with a girl who feared nothing in this world had left her ready to love a boy whose heart had been broken before she ever touched him.”This book was so much more than a beautiful flower garden with beautiful girls and a mysterious boy. The author effortlessly explores immigration, sexuality, people of color, gender fluidity, social status, and those who are forgotten. I adored the way the McLemore didn’t make their love for women and occasionally men as something to be astounded by. Perhaps in the future, this book will not be so uncommon and I’ll be happy for such a diverse future, but at this moment books with these character’s are rare. I enjoyed learning the secret of their ‘curse’ and it had me questioning our own land and what lays beneath.“They would change nothing by picking flowers.They had to rip out their fate by the roots.”To read my more in-depth review head to: Inktingeddreamer.wordpress.com/

This book is magical realism with the emphasis on magic, the story of a family of women who can make flowers flow from their hands and a boy who seemingly appears out of the earth with no memory of who he is. Although it has at least a toehold attachment to the “real” contemporary world, it reads like a timeless fairy tale. The writing is gorgeous, I mean DROP. DEAD. GORGEOUS, full of magical gardens, curses, stars, and dragonfly-horses. The central romance, though one can see it coming, lands as lightly as feathers or flower petals. These virtues justify every one of the five stars I gave it.It does have a few drawbacks, though. The greatest is the pace: you have to be willing to give yourself completely to its slowly flowing river of prose without ever trying to hurry it, or you will be frustrated. Much as I liked the book, I almost dropped it a few times because I got tired of waiting for something to happen already. I didn’t drop it, and I’m very glad I didn’t, but it was a struggle at times.Perhaps relatedly, the characters were not strongly individual to me. I was eventually able to separate the five Nomeolvides cousins, but not by a lot. Bay Briar, the androgynous young woman the girls all had crushes on, sounded delightful, but I had only occasional glimpses of her. Reid, the villain of the piece, was simply a stereotype of the rich, entitled male. In short, the roles that the characters needed to play in the fairy tale greatly dominated over their identity as believable people.I strongly recommend this book to anyone who likes magical realism or the gentler variety of fantasy (Charles de Lint, say). Take a deep breath and let its flow carry you away.