Wonderland Novels: [Review] Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore

Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore

Rating: 4 stars

Published: October 3rd 2017

Goodreads Synopsis:

Love grows such strange things.
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.

I always enjoyed the magical realism that McLemore brings to her books.

The Nomeolvides women have been cursed to remain on the land of La Pradera and tend to it, for generations upon generations. There have always been five women per generation, with powers to spawn flowers and other fauna at will. This changes when their powers unearth a boy from beneath the ground, a boy who doesn't remember his own name. This leads the Nomeolvides women to uncover the secrets of La Pradera.
First of all, McLemore's writing is super mystical and eloquent - it draws you into the mystery and keeps you there, up to the end.

He had done something wicked enough for God to carve out the center of him, and bad enough taht 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.
He could not even confess his sins to them because he could not remember the ways in which he had fallen. p. 47

We focus especially on Estrella, one of the youngest generations of daughters in La Pradera, and Fin, the unknown boy. There's this strong undercurrent of female empowerment present in Wild Beauty, as they and the rest of the Nomeolvides women fend off Reid from seizing their land and using their powers.

"I'm not afraid of him. My mother always says the same thing about men like that. They're cotton candy. All puff and show, but throw water on them and they dissolve." - p. 136

There's even a certain kind of strength when admitting their faults. All the women have fallen in love with Bay Briar, the bastard child of a family who runs La Pradera. But as the story continues, they realize they have fallen in love with the idea of Bay, and not the actual person.

"We thought everything about her was some costume, some kind of show, but she is a person. She doesn't exist for us to look at. She wasn't there so we could admire her. She's her own person. We never left any room for that. And that's my fault as much as yours, or Gloria's, or Azalea's, or Calla's. We all did it. I did it. We made her ours, and we didn't leave any space for her to decide herself. We have her not room to be anything other than what we made her." - p. 178

The plot unfurled like petals on a flower, slowly settling down at just the right speed. It was so calming to read this book.