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.

Lush, hypnotic, and fiercely charming. It didn't draw me in as immediately or move me as deeply as Anna-Marie McLemore's previous book WHEN THE MOON WAS OURS. Yet WILD BEAUTY is still a gorgeously written tale of family, love, loss, and righting past wrongs. I enjoyed watching Estrella interact with her cousins; not only were their dynamics realistic, but they also revealed the subtle differences that made each girl unique. Plus, McLemore was born to write about flowers and gardens. Her rich descriptions of La Pradera and the ethereality of the Nomeolvides women's flower-growing abilities made the place seem so real that I wish this book wasn't the only way of visiting it.

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.

No he leído el libro pero llego en excelentes condiciones. Gracias Amazon

The Nomeolvides women's lives have been shaped by magic for generations. Gifted with the ability to make beautiful flowers spring from their hands, but cursed to lose their lovers, they have been hounded out of towns again and again. The grounds, and owners, of the La Pradera estate offers them sanctuary, and in return the family create and maintain magnificent gardens beyond comparison. However, the land exacts a terrible price for their safety. Not only do the Nomeolvide's lovers disappear forever if the women love them too hard, but the gardens kill any woman who tries to leave for good. Determined to keep Bay, the girl they all love, safe, the latest generation of Nomeolvides girls offer up gifts to the land, and end up raising a mysterious boy from the ground. His appearance is followed by a set of disasters as Bay's unwelcome relative Reid appears to claim La Pradera, and the Nomeolvides women. Worse yet, Bay suddenly disappears. Meanwhile Fel, the boy who emerged from the ground with no memories, grows dangerously close to Estrella, the member of the Nomeolvides clan who has always felt a little out of step with the world around her. Pulled in multiple directions by her family's secrets, her anger, and her feelings for Fel, Estrella's world begins to spin at a dizzying pace. Wild Beauty is a stunning book about magic, romance, fear, and oppression. Its prose unwinds sensuously. It is a book that makes a virtue out of decadent, indulgent descriptions. The romantic relationships that take place between some of its characters unfurl as the slowest of slow burns. Wild Beauty has a wide cast of lesbian, bisexual and genderqueer characters who are hopelessly, and not so hopelessly, in love, and this book features of a variety of passionate romantic relationships. It's also a novel full of strong, detailed family relationships which stretch over multiple generations. And finally, it's a novel with an intensely political heart; a portion of which is fully revealed to great effect close to the end of the story. This novel is a delicious treat to unwrap, and will snare you with its masterful depictions of everything from the treasures the girls use to appease the curse, to the gardens they create, to the hotbed of bubbling emotions that surrounds the family and everyone they come into contact with. Highly recommended. I grabbed When The Moon Was Ours, one of McLemore's other novels which came highly recommended, as soon as I could.

Oh, this book. First of all, nobody can draw pictures and while scenes in front of my inner eye like McLemore does. Not one soul. I love her writing, the magic, every metaphor and allegory, every image and symbol. This story gripped me first and foremost because it was so focused on the girls and the women before them. And it kept me riveted because of the unique combination of real life, magic and everything in between. Each aspect of the plot was flowing into the next do effortlessly, the story unfolding perfectly and not letting me go for one moment. And I adored the romantic story arc - of both couples - and the sharp look on familial bonds, trust, love and difficulties. So why am I torn up about it? Because as much as I loved it, one part of it became this deeply seated *ache* the longer I read. Namely, there are the girls and the boys. The girls and the boys and girls they fall in love with. There are the women. And the women and men they fall in love with. The girls with the magic. The boys with the history. The girls and the boys, and the boys and the girls and every binary phrase you can think of to express the sentiment. Boys and Girls. And it's... I get that this book was focused on the girls - girls of color who are are erased from most other stories completely. And I'm not saying I'm prioritizing my queerness over that. It's just that... I had a hard time not feeling hurt and invalidated by the way every phrase about gender in this book was about girls and boys, no other option available. And I wish it wasn't and I wish it didn't hurt. Well, it hurt me, I'm not sure it would others. I loved this book to pieces, but in the end it did hurt me too.

It was such a beautiful and calming book to read, yet very engaging. Loved the characters and this story of magic and family.

Anything and everything that Anna-Marie McLemore writes is a triumph. They are just that good! This story follows the new generation of girls of the Nomeolvides generation. Their family is blessed with the ability to grow flowers which they do in their La Pradera. There are just a couple of problems — they can never leave La Pradera and every man that Nomeolvides women have loved, has disappeared. But the latter is no problem at all, because all the Nomeolvides girl love the same person, and she is not a man. So, surely, she will be spared of this curse? Rife with the lyrical, purple prose that is a benchmark of both A-M and magical realism, this book feels like a dream and yet real, simultaneously. It discusses racism and capitalism, and how colonialism is at the base of these concepts. It's beautifully imagined and wonderfully presented. It talks of the fickleness and permanence of love, of the bonds of family and finding justice.