The Beautiful Ones by
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
I finally read this (she writes so fast I had two books by her on my eARC backlog! I made myself read this one before
Velvet Was the Night).
It's
like... alt history or just nameless vague regency plus a little bit of
telekinetic magic. No Mexican folklore or mythology elements that I can
identify although some reviews have labeled it as "telenovela" -
perhaps only because of who the author is? It has quite a few
similarities to
Shades of Milk and Honey but the pacing is quite slow - I found myself skimming to the parts between Nina and Hector.
Here's
my confession - there's a lot of space between expectation and
experience in this one. I'm so used to her usual mode of taking a strong
female, uprooting her, and placing her into a story that is somehow
colored by Mexican or Central American mythology or folklore that I kind
of felt like this story wasn't as interesting without that component.
There
is a woman, Nina, who is uprooted, and has been a bit of an
outcast because of her telekinetic abilities. She bonds with a
performer who has similar abilities and hopes to marry him, but his
story has a lot of secrets that get in the way.
My second
confession - since I've read her vampire book, her gods book, etc., I
thought The Beautiful Ones would be some kind of supernatural being. I'm
kind of bummed that they aren't.
In the society itself are the
"beautiful ones" who seem to be old money types who don't actually have
money, but they are well-mannered and still hold a place in society. She
has this blood but was raised outside the city and starts out with her
cousin who is supposed to help her find a husband. But nobody wants her
to use her abilities in public! And okay I love telekinetic stuff in
books (
The Girl with the Silver Eyes
was my absolutely favorite book as a kid) but it's a little too
infrequent in this book that I found myself skimming to those parts,
since the rest of it is paced pretty slowly. Some exciting things that
happen, like a duel, just held no interest to me whatsoever.
One
thing I really liked, and I hope we see this again from the author, was
her omniscient narrator voice - the point of view doesn't switch but we
are able to see the thinking of more than one character, and I really
like being able to do this. The way she wrote it, it added a lot to the
story, leaving the reader with a more complete picture than the
characters sometimes had. Still, the other issues like pacing and lack
of development make it at the bottom of the author's oeuvre for me.
Thanks to the publisher for granting me access to this title via Edelweiss. It came out April 27!
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