“McLemore’s second novel is such a lush surprising fable, you half expect birds to fly out of the pages… McLemore uses the supernatural to remind us that the body’s need to speak its truth is primal and profound, and that the connection between two people is no more anyone’s business than why the dish ran away with the spoon.” –Jeff Giles, New York Times Book Review, on When the Moon was Ours … Moon was Ours
Love grows such strange things.
Anna-Marie McLemore’s debut novel The Weight of Feathers garnered fabulous reviews and was a finalist for the prestigious YALSA Morris Award, and her second novel, When the Moon was Ours, was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Now, in Wild Beauty, McLemore introduces a spellbinding setting and two characters who are drawn together by fate–and pulled apart by reality.
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 vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens.
The boy is a mystery to Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, and to her family, but he’s even more a mystery to himself; he knows nothing more about who he is or where he came from than his first 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.
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What a beautiful and dark story.
This luxurious, lyrical story of cursed women with the power to bring forth flowers from their hands lets you linger in the prose and soak in the story. Beautiful queer representation. A celebration of the different kinds of love that exist, and a powerful narrative on the way some human life is valued over others.
This is magical realism, which I adore and write. I know it’s a hard sell for some people, but if you’re on the fence, I do encourage you to pick it up. Especially if you enjoyed Addie LaRue or The Night Circus.
Much like the flowers that grow on the grounds of La Pradera, Anna-Marie McLemore’s Wild Beauty is every bit as enchanting as it is deadly to all who enter. It takes hold of the reader from page one, wrapping itself around you like a vine pulling you farther into the magical and frightening yet beautiful world that McLemore created. The Nomeolvides women, young and old, are unlike any other women in the world. They are each unique in their way but very similar to one another to grow beauty from their hands. McLemore has a rare gift of making the reader see and smell but taste the world she has created which is extremely unusual.
The love and family between these women are developed with such care that you can feel it sing to your soul. You feel like part of their family, not just an outsider looking into their world and observing. The younger girls all fall for the same girl who lives on the land but is not blood-related. It makes for an interesting dynamic to see how each feels about her in their unique way. However, we find very soon that this bestowed gift they have comes with a cost that is in many ways too large to pay.
The pain, love, happiness, and loss swirls on the pages in such a way that it makes the reader breathless at times. It is so much to take, but you find yourself asking for more, a lot like the La Pradera asks of the Nomeolvides women. In many ways, I understood La Pradera throughout the book because it was always asking the women to give it more of themselves, and I felt like I was doing the same. I wanted more of them, but in doing so, it was destroying them a little each time. It was a double-edged sword for the women; they have this gift that they must use but using it takes pieces of themselves in the end. What a beautiful way to look at life and women, giving ourselves over, and sometimes it destroys us in the process. I don’t know if the author intended this message to be passed on, but it made me think about life as a woman after reading this story. It made me reflect on what gets taken from us and what it does to us. Anna-Marie McLemore is a talent beyond her years, and I look forward to reading more from her to see what else she has to say.
The way Anna-Marie McLemore in “Wild Beauty” describes the story is very compelling. The women in the Nomeolvides family have a gift to magically grow plants according to their names, for example, Azalea can make azalea flowers grow with her hands. Rosa can grow roses. This family carries a curse in their blood, whoever they fall in love with, suddenly disappears. An enchanting story about love and family. The similes are comparisons used to enrich the story, that when used in the book, make it sound very beautiful, for example: “Estrella’s heart shivered like it wore a coat of hoarfrost”. With such a descriptive language and the use of imagery (descriptions that deepen our view of the story) such as “Estrella took hold of his arm, saying his name. / He looked at her” and personification (non-human things abstractly described) like: “He was the almond trees ringing his grandmother’s village”. With those figurative languages, readers can perfectly imagine the scene, the place, the surroundings, and even the smells.
Even though the story is perfectly represented, it’s a considerably long book (335 pages without counting the acknowledgments) and it takes a long while to really understand the slow development of the plot. However, it’s not a book easily predictable.
By the end of the book, this family finally understands why their loved ones were simply vanishing. Without spoiling the story, in order to break free from the curse that runs in the veins of this family, they must tell the truth about what happened in La Pradera, the land they live in, more than a 100 years ago. The situation all the characters find themselves in reminds me of when big companies try to stifle a case to avoid the population’s panic and/or to protect their image. The message this book transmits is that we should always tell the truth because, somehow, fate always finds a way to unbury all lies.
This is another book that starts SOOOO SLOW but then it really picks up. It is a beautiful story about revenge, forgotten people, and love.
Lush, evocative magical realism—I’m stunned by the beauty of this story, still turning its core messages about love, complicity, and restitution over in my mind. I adored the characters and, as a white cishet woman, really appreciated the ownvoices Latinx and queer representation. Anna-Marie McLemore wrote my favorite stories in two YA anthologies I read earlier this year and she’s even more amazing in long-form.
This is why you can’t judge a book by a cover…
It was a bit confusing at times to figure out what exactly was happening, and there were too many characters to keep track of, but it was a nice story that I enjoyed reading. It reminded me a bit of All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater.