My mother once said that only the Beautiful Ones survive. This is because, in the war-torn Great South, beauty is a currency, and to have it means you will never have to worry about a thing. The only problem is: beauty is judged by our capital’s Gentlewomen, and there is no guarantee that we will pass their test. Every year, the Gentlewomen of the capital leave the Glittering City to oversee the … Glittering City to oversee the annual Procession. They travel settlement to settlement selecting girls, aged sixteen and older, to become Beautiful Ones. If chosen, we will be lifted into a life of luxury, but the cost is our free will.
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4.5 Cranky Stars
Imagine if you will a world where being beautiful got you everything you ever dreamed of. A safe secure place to live, people doing your bidding at every whim and the like. That is what this book is about yet it’s much more sinister. I hate to compare it to the Hunger Games but in a way it’s like that instead of going off to fight in some competition there is a competition where your area is judging young girls on their beauty except if you are chosen you are to leave your life behind for the Glittering City. This is the story of Kalendra.
Kalendra was told from a time when she was little that being a Beautiful One was a great honor. Her and her mother scrape to get by while her dad is off fighting in a great war. When her time comes up to be judged she is nervous and filled with trepidation. She doesn’t want to leave her life behind, but she has been raised for this moment. When she finds herself in the capitol, she finds it increasingly harder to keep her mouth shut and her eyes down when she learns her true purpose. She is to marry Daniel Cross a fellow Handsome One despite not knowing him at all and they suddenly become targets for the rebel army. Her life is spiraling out of control and she doesn’t know who to trust anymore.
I’m not going to lie this book was different. It’s been a while since I read a dystopian novel so it took me a bit to get into the swing of it. I liked that Kalendra knew her cause and what she wanted to fight for. I can’t wait to watch her grow as the books go on. I like that Daniel is actually a good person at his core so at least she has a friend in him. I just hope Ceyonne comes around though. All in all a good start to a dystopian world where being beautiful has its advantages and it’s price.
THE BEAUTIFUL ONES by Koby Boye is a Young Adult dystopian novel with a twist. Rather than being about a young action heroine who is struggling against the tyranny of the week, it is the story of a woman who wins a peculiar “beauty pageant” that results in her becoming one of the Beautiful Ones. They are people who have been selected for their strong genetics to be the pampered and beloved wives to a eugenicist experiment in the Glittering City. If this sounds like there’s a shoe waiting to drop, you’d be half-right.
Kelendra is an entertaining but reserved character as she has been raised by her family to endure The Process. They’ve done her best to use their meager resources to make her spectacularly lovely in hopes of getting her accepted as one of the Beautiful Ones. It’s something Kelendra never got a chance to particularly want for herself and when she is accepted, doesn’t quite know what to do with herself since it separates her from the only life she’s ever known.
If I had to describe this, I’d say this is something akin to a PG-13 version of the Handmaid’s Tale. There’s even a figure known ominously as the Commandant who develops a liking for Kelendra’s best friend (and goes after her in a subdued but horrifying scene). There’s also elements of the Hunger Games with the entirety of Kelendra’s village being fascinated by the prospect of her becoming a Beautiful One even as they expect to never see her again.
The world-building is exceptionally well done as Kody draws on the Antebellum South and Civil War motifs to give a sense of what the world is like. It is definitely in the future but not so far in the future that the Old World is completely forgotten. Indeed, it’s implied it may be only a few decades away from now with the dystopian Glittering City having been built in the aftermath of the United States’ recent fall.
Do I have any issues? Well, one. The thing is that being a Beautiful One doesn’t actually seem to be that bad. You’re required to be in an arranged marriage but Kelendra is set up with a young man of her own age, who seems to be every bit the kind of pleasant and good person she is. It also does rescue her from poverty and near-starvation.
When dealing with a bunch of eugenics-obsessed bad guys, I kept expecting some terrible twist: that Kelendra was actually asexual or gay, her husband to be was, her husband to be was abusive, or the Beautiful Ones were meant to be harem girls for the rich and powerful of the city. Kelendra is horrified by the thought of getting married so young and having children but arranged marriages were the way things went for most of human history. At the least least, I was expecting a horrible racial undercurrent to exist to the Process but I didn’t see any evidence of that either.
This is a small issue, though, as I genuinely enjoyed following Kelendra through her journey. She is a passive character but incredibly perceptive. I really did sympathize with the fact she’s being taken from her loved ones for the promise of a new life she’s not sure she wants for herself. There also are many hints to just how horrifying this society is with the majority of lower-class men having been conscripted into what is implied to be a WW1-esque meatgrinder. I immediately picked up and read the second book after finishing the first one and suspect you will too. I rarely comment on covers but I also feel the artist for this one should be commended–it’s a really lovely work.