historical fantasy – Adri's Book Reviews

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

2017, Innsmouth Free Press/Thomas Dunne Books

I have to preface this review by worrying that I’m not the right person to write it! I rarely read romances, and my knowledge of the Belle Époque period that The Beautiful Ones draws on for its setting and, I think, its style, is fairly limited – although I have read a passable cross section of other 18^th and 19^th century fiction including a fair number of gothic novels. Despite not feeling up to the task, I find a lot to recommend and to talk about in The Beautiful Ones, so I’m going to dial up my courage and engage with this book on its own merits.

The Beautiful Ones follows Nina Beaulieu, a woman who has travelled from her countryside home to the big city for her first ever Grand Season. Nina is, as befits this trope, somewhat overwhelmed by city life and bemused by the things the people surrounding her find important, and has unfortunately been left in the primary care of her married cousin, Valérie, who is equal parts vindictive and impatient towards her relative – having been left embittered by her own experiences of romance and marriage a decade earlier. To make matters worse, Nina has telekinetic powers, a rare gift in her world and a practice considered decidedly unsuitable for well-bred young women.

Enter Hector Auvray, a dashing performer renowned for his own telekinesis, who gets talking to Nina at a ball and soon falls into her orbit. Nina is initially keen to spend time with Hector in order to get him to teach her to control her powers – which, untrained, flare up when she gets emotional – but when he apparently begins to court her, her feelings quickly change into something more. We learn early on, however, that Hector is the very man who had his heart broken by Valerie a decade earlier, and that his scheme to get close to Nina may be no more than a ploy to get close to his old flame…

Given the conventions of romance novels, particularly the need for a “happily ever after”, I spent almost the first half of the book being deeply sceptical of the narrative, and particularly of Hector, a much older and more experienced man who is shamelessly using the affections of a young, inexperienced woman for completely pointless ends. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by how the second act was handled, with both Nina and Hector offered opportunities to grow and to re-establish a relationship in a way which felt much more “right”, despite the external obstacles placed in their way. Nina’s telekinesis, and her process of learning to use it, is utilised to great effect, particularly in the second act. This is the second of Moreno-Garcia’s books I’ve read with a magic system greatly affects the characters without impacting the setting (although Signal to Noise is urban fantasy, whereas the Beautiful Ones is set in secondary world – just an overwhelmingly mundane one) and once again I think its handled very well, with the disapproval of society towards Nina providing a perfect encapsulation of how disinterested these “Beautiful Ones” are in her true self, and how narrow and unsatisfying that definition of “beauty” is.

The Beautiful Ones keeps its main cast small: apart from Nina, Valérie and Hector, we also have Valerie’s husband Gaetan – who is nowhere near as boring and awful as Valérie makes out – and the siblings Luc and Étienne Lémy, who serve as complicating factor and friend of Hector respectively. I did feel the lack of a larger supporting cast made things quite claustrophobic at times, which heightened some of the melodrama but also undermined the feeling of being in a grand city full of societal intrigue. In particular, it’s a shame that Nina makes no female friends her own age, even in the second half of the book where she is less reliant on Valérie and the plot does not require her to be directly constrained. I also felt occasionally that the writing style muffled the more lurid plot elements – there’s a magical performance and a duel in this book, after all – and could have played with a less detached style, particularly at those more melodramatic points.

Despite those issues, the Beautiful Ones was gripping and didn’t feel slow to me at all, given the amount of both internal and external nonsense the characters have to wade through in order to get their HEA. I still don’t think romance is going to form more than an occasional (and usually accidental) part of my reading diet, but I was overall very impressed by this book, and it’s cemented Silvia Moreno-Garcia on my ever-growing “author to watch” list. While I can’t analyse the Beautiful Ones against many other works of its genre, or the historical period it pastiches, it stands perfectly well on its own merits and I would recommend it as such.

Rating: 7 floating card shuffles out of 10.

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

2017, Harper Voyager

City of Brass has been on my reading list since I saw the cover and blurb among a list of 2017 releases – gorgeous looking book with historical Middle Eastern influences? Sounds great! Alas, I did not get quite the experience I wanted from it, although some aspects are very good indeed.

The book primarily follows Nahri, a young woman working as a con artist on the streets of 18^th century Cairo. Confusingly, despite having demonstrable magic healing and language powers, Nahri initially does not believe in magic, instead focusing on the more material things in life (like survival on the streets of 18th century Cairo). What finally makes this belief system unsustainable is her accidental summoning of a very attractive Daeva, or djinn, who promptly saves her from some marauding ghouls and whisks her away. She agrees to follow him on a trip to Daevabad, the titular City of Brass and home of the djinn, a journey which neither of them particularly want to take, but which Dara (the aforementioned attractive Daeva) says will be safest for someone of Nahri’s very special bloodline – because, of course, she is not a human but a shafit, part-djinn, and from an extinct royal line at that. Interspersed with Dara and Nahri’s journey, and blending with their narrative partway through, is the story of Ali, the younger son of Daevabad’s ruler, who is funding shafit rebels within the city to help improve their position.

Despite explicitly saying on the back cover that this is adult fantasy, I’ve seen City of Brass lumped in with YA numerous times (including on the Locus Recommended Reading List), and there’s certainly a few recognisable beats from YA fantasy – a love triangle, a “mundane” heroine who discovers she is actually the Special, and a vaguely unpleasant setting with a highly regimented and easy-to-learn caste system all make an appearance. With that said, this book is much richer than that summary would suggest, and I felt the worldbuilding was extremely detailed – and, I hope, well researched – and interesting, and certainly big enough to support more than this single story. It’s also very well-written, in a style which demanded and rewarded concentration – Chakraborty certainly knows what she’s doing.

So yes, I liked City of Brass, but I couldn’t help feeling that its content was always slightly too far from what I wanted it to do – I wanted more early character work and clearer motivation, especially for Nahri; and less of the intricate, racially-delineated political scheming – much of which I found hard to concentrate on or care about without the links to character motivation being clearly spelled out. The pacing also felt a little off, and I couldn’t help but feel that the second half of the book, where Nahri and Dara have arrived in Daevabad and are negotiating court politics, could have done with much more room to breathe. The second half of the book also laid bare just how little reason either of them had to go to Daevabad, a city now run by rivals of both Nahri and Dara’s clan, and who consider the latter to be an irredeemable war criminal. Neither character had anything to do when they got there besides “be safe”, except that they clearly aren’t safe. This constant meandering – which also happens to a lesser extent with Ali, who doesn’t seem to have a strong motivation to help the shafit, particularly when his own safety is on the line – makes it much harder to care about the situations the characters end up in, because the whole time you’re reminding yourself they don’t even have a reason to be there.

I’ll be watching how the sequels in this series pan out, and whether some of my concerns seem to be addressed in later books – there’s certainly enough exciting elements here that I’d love to see this series work out. For now, though, I’d recommend this mostly to people who want to experience a fascinating, intricate fantasy world, rather than those hoping for a particularly compelling plot.

6 out of 10.