I read The Belles

This week's novel is The Belles, by Dhonielle Clayton.

In a world where everyone is born with gray skin and red eyes, a set of magical girls, called belles, can change people's appearance to make them beautiful for a price.  Camellia has worked her whole life towards being skilled enough to be The Favorite, the belle assigned to the royal family, who sets beauty standards across the country.  When she finally reaches that goal, she finds that the position is way more dangerous than she'd ever thought.

I have a couple warnings to start with if you're thinking of reading this book.  1. There are egregious examples of bury your gays.  You read that right, "examples" is plural.  2. There's a series of headlines, just several in a list, and one of them mentions a trans person.   Somehow in that single headline and single mention in the entire book, it still manages to misgender them.

I'm not in the mood to find stuff I liked about this one.

This book did not dive into the themes set up in the premise as much as I was hoping for.  This story seems like fertile ground to talk about how arbitrary it is that some features are considered beautiful and some aren't.  Especially given that the main character is a person of color, whose skin tone and hair texture are, in modern American culture, considered undesirable.  Since there isn't race in this fantastical society, Camellia's skin tone is treated as just a variant on a theme, and--heck--let's get into that!  But no.  The premise also seems like fertile ground for discussing how only the wealthy can afford the treatments to make them beautiful, while the poor are gray, red-eyed troll people.  Do the gray, red-eyed troll people think they're ugly, because they're told they are every day?  Do the wealthy look down on them? Has anyone tried to make a fashion statement by having openly gray skin?  Being beautiful is something mandated by the Goddess they worship, so what does it mean that they're charging people to obey the goddess' mandate?  We don't know.  It's not important. 

Instead, the book focuses on how the princess, who will probably inherit the throne, is a cartoon villain, and Camilla needs to stop her/do everything she says.

I was even expecting for the beauty standards of this world to be bizarre and engaging.  If you're starting from gray, why wouldn't people have blue skin and three eyes and hair that sticks straight up in the air?  I was expecting full on Capital from the Hunger Games, and although there are blips of weirdness, the book never lets loose with it.  And that makes the moments of weirdness confusing.  Are they supposed to be weird?

"The wardrobe opens and the interior explodes with color.  Dresses with full skirts, A-line cuts, empire waists, sheaths, long sleeves, cap sleeves, no sleeves, V-necks and scoop necks and plunging necklines.  Dresses made of brocades, laces, velvets, glass beads, cashmeres, silks, and pastel satins in every color and pattern.  Special carts follow the wardrobe, carrying vivant dresses inside large glass bell jars.  These are dresses made of living things.  Butterflies open and close their wings, exposing their dress's inner rib cage.  Honeybees buzz in and out of a honeycomb-shaped gown.  Roses of every color wave their petals."  I can picture everything but the honeybee dress, which seems wildly out of place.  Then on the next page, there's this:  "I'm wearing one of the Fashion Minister's latest creations--a honey-and-marigold bustle dress with a waffle texture and a waist-sash of striped fur."  Is...that pretty? Does Camilla think it's pretty?  To me, it doesn't sound stunning or wild, just...unpleasant.

That's a problem I've been encountering a lot.  If a setting or a dress is described and none of the characters give their opinion on it, sometimes I can't tell if the reader is supposed to be awed or think, "Wow, that's tacky."  Maybe it's because I read this book right after Crazy Rich Asians, which does a similar thing, but the point is supposed to be that--yep--that's pretty tacky.

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Next week, I'll be in a better mood with Leviathan Wakes, space opera by James S.A. Corey.