First impressions review: Wild Beauty, by Anna-Marie McLemore
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But in this case, the lushly beautiful cover art above – seriously, look at that! – is an entirely accurate reflection of the gorgeous flower-studded story inside. The tale focuses on the Nomeolvides family, a matriarchal clan who have been called witches due to their ability to generate flowers – an ability that can’t be suppressed, only channeled. For a hundred years they have found a safe haven as the gardeners of La Pradera, an estate owned by the wealthy Briar family. But they can no longer leave the estate; if they try, they find themselves choking on pollen. And they carry another curse as well: if they fall too deeply in love with someone, that person vanishes from the world.
The book begins when the youngest generation of Nomeolvides discover they all have a shared secret:
Dalia had been smart enough not to keep any evidence. But her cousins knew, as soon as they saw the color bloom in her cheeks. Dalia, too, had fallen a little in love with Bay Briar. With Bay’s laugh, reckless as any boy’s. With how she dressed…Satin trousers to the knee, cinched coat, ivory stockings…All five Nomeolvides girls loved Bay Briar.
But if the love of one of them would be enough to make a man vanish, how could Bay possibly survive all of them? So the girls take their favorite treasures – earrings, perfume, a little winged horse, etc. – and make an offering of them to the gardens, begging La Pradera to keep Bay safe. The next morning, Estrella finds a boy in the garden. He is covered in soil as if he came from underground and he doesn’t remember who he is. They call him “Fel” for the three letters left on a ripped off tag – I guessed it originally said “Felipe” – and hypothesize that he could be a sign that the land heard them, that it might begin giving back those who had been taken.
The perspective of the book flips back and forth between Estrella and Fel from that point on. They are both basically good but wounded people and watching the understanding grow between them – with some painful fits and starts – is lovely. Estrella, as befits her name, tends toward the confident and fiery. Out of all the family, she is the only one whose gift is so powerful she conjures flowers in her sleep, starflower vines blooming on her ceiling. However, she isn’t always the most perceptive to what other people are feeling, and her focus on her own family’s history and curse can cause her to miss alternative explanations for events. As for Fel, he carries a sense that he must have done something terrible in his past life:
That night, behind the door of that room they had put him in, he broke open. All the color, all the things he did not know, the paths of the scarring under his fingers, broke him open. He bit the backs of his hands so he would not cry onto the wooden horses. He had done something wicked enough for God to carve out the center of him, and bad enough that men had marked him with it. If that was true, these women were showing him kindness God would not have wanted for him. But God had hollowed him out, and now he was not strong enough to refuse as firmly as these women insisted.
As time goes on, though, he starts to get fragments of memory back: of a green land of his childhood and a harsh land where he lived afterward, of a family member who loved him and the foods that they ate, and so on. A connection begins to grow between him and Estella, and the land seems to respond to that, sprouting things he recognizes but she does not, like blue milkcap mushrooms.
All of the five cousins are bi, and I just have to share how that is described because it is perfect:
“I want you to wake up,” Gloria said. “All of us, our hearts for women and for men. You know what that means?” “More ways to lose them?” Estrella asked. “Our hearts or the ones we love?” Gloria asked. “Both.” The word came out bitter. Estrella let it. This was what their mothers would say if she and her cousins ever told them the things they folded inside their hearts. Twice as many paths to trouble, their mothers would whisper. As though their daughters loving men and women meant they wanted all of them in the world. There was no way to tell their mothers the truth and make them believe it, that hearts that loved boys and girls were no more reckless or easily won than any other heart…Estrella’s heart and her cousins’ hearts, the way they were as likely to fall in love with women as with men, was a language the five of them shared. But they did not know how to teach it to their mothers and grandmothers… “There’s nothing wrong with who we love,” Estrella whispered. “What’s wrong is what’s always been wrong. We’re Nomeolvides girls.”1
However, Estrella actually finds more understanding than she expects, both from her family and from Fel.
1. The flower
imagery and the fear of being a poison to those one loves reminded me of a
scene from the equally bi-AF 'Revolutionary Girl Utena’, where Anthy
and Utena darkly joke about having poisoned each other’s cookies and tea - which could be an allusion to the idea of F/F love being seen as
unnatural and poisonous, or to the way that they are both engaged in toxic
relationships with the main villain which makes it hard for THEIR love to be
fully healthy. But then they talk about how, when they think of the future, they
picture having tea with each other twenty years later...a hope the series also ends on.
The names in this story matter. The Nomeolvides women have an affinity with their namesake flowers: Calla with calla lilies, Gloria with morning glories, Dalia with dahlias, and so on. Estrella’s mother Rosa tried to break the pattern, but there is a plant whose name means “star flower” in Spanish, and so that’s what she grows. Bay Briar has a plant name too, and the somewhat androgynous character of that name - neither bay trees nor briars are especially showy or feminine, but they are still flowering plants - fits her perfectly. La Pradera means “the meadow”, which seems an oddly unassuming name for a house surrounded by such grand gardens, but of course the flower ladies didn’t always live there. And their family name, which means “forget-me-not,” ends up being a clue to why their twin curses exist: something has been forgotten. There’s more social commentary in this book than you might initially expect, and the answer is part of that. But there are hints even early on that this will be the case, with the story that the Nomeolvides family were once “hijas del aire”, daughters of the air, without proper papers, left on the wrong side when the border changed.
When it comes to “write what you know”, this author seems to have really run with that concept here to wonderful effect. McLemore is a non-binary2 Mexican-American person who cites fairytales and ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ as major influences on their writing. They also mention that their family wasn’t at all surprised when they declared they were going to write a book about flowers, because when they were a kid they always wanted to go to the botanic garden of every city the family visited. While I suspect their other books don’t include that highly-relatable-to-me element, I am excited to see what other stories they have to tell.
2. Which, to be clear, is not the same as being bisexual! But I suspect that the sense of occupying a liminal social space is similar and helped with writing characters like Estrella. And, while it’s not outright stated, Bay could certainly be read as not entirely within the “woman” box.
Overall recommendation: If you like flowers and fairytales and/or magical realism but would prefer they NOT romanticize unhealthy relationships…this is the book for you.
