Tuesday, March 13, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton





    The Belles is an example of a classic type of SciFi/Fantasy: where the author takes a real world thing, and makes it the centerpiece of their world.  In the case of The Belles, that "thing" is an obsession with "Beauty," which forms the centerpiece of the novel's fantasy world and plot.  This is a world in which everyone is born gray and ugly, and only certain individuals with magical powers - the titular Belles - can change people's appearances away from their default gray state into something more normal, or even into something particularly special and beautiful.

   In essence, The Belles takes this setup to create a thriller, with our protagonist caught up in conspiracies and lies and trying to find out both the truth behind it all as well as simply to survive the situation she finds herself in.  It's very similar in that way to Genevieve Valentine's "Persona" duology (Which is a thriller in a world where the most important thing is "Celebrity" rather than Beauty), except for one thing: whereas the Persona books were very tightly focused, The Belles is......not.  The end result is a book that basically reads more like a prologue than a completed story, which is disappointing given all of the interesting and different worldbuilding that went into this one.


---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
  In the world of Orleans, a curse by the God of the Sky renders it so that everyone is born gray - gray skinned, red eyes, and hair the color of rotten straw.  However, there exist individuals known as the "Belles", who are celebrated throughout the land due to their magical powers (or "Arcana") to change a person's looks and manner, not only being able to remove the gray from a person, but for the ability to use a person's appearance as a canvas and to change their looks entirely.  Every few years, the latest crop of Belles is taken to the mainland of the Country to show off their skills to determine where they each are destined to serve the people of Orleans - most will wind up replacing their predecessors at the teahouses around the land, but one will be declared the favorite, and shall work in the Palace.

  Camellia Beauregard is one of the latest crop of Belles - a group of 7 young women who think of each other as sisters.  Still, she wants to be the favorite desperately, even if that means that her best friend Amber (known as Ambrosia) will be hurt, and chafes under the rules meant to constrict the use of her abilities.  But when Amber is chosen as the favorite instead, Camellia begins to discover that the world of Orleans is very different from what she's been told, and that some very important secrets have been kept from the Belles.

  And then Camellia is mysteriously chosen to replace Amber as the favorite, for reasons no one will state clearly.  Suddenly at the palace, Camellia is thrown into a power struggle between the mad princess Sophia and the dying Queen searching desperately for a way to cure her eldest daughter from years-long sleep.  Camellia finds herself searching for answers but with little time to do so, as Sophia is controlling and demanding and takes the slightest excuse to torture those who oppose her, even marginally.  And then there's the mysterious boy who keeps finding excuses to be around Camellia, despite it being punishable by death for a Belle to be involved with anyone, or even to be touched without permission.

  It will come down to Camellia being faced with impossible choices, with one wrong move possibly resulting in the end for her and anyone she cares about.....
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The Belles is excellent at worldbuilding, which is good because its world is very different from our own.   The world is seen exclusively through Camellia's eyes, but the book does a very good job describing her observations in a way that colors the world for the reader without her having to explain everything (especially as she doesn't quite understand what she's seeing as much as the reader does sometimes).

Camellia is a pretty solid main character - torn between her desire to be the best Belle ever and her desire to not do what she believes is wrong and also her want to be with her sisters, she does a good job guiding us through the story as she discovers more and more that things are very much not what she's been told, often in very horrible ways.

Unfortunately, the book basically doesn't develop any other main characters as being anything more than simple tropes (probably the second most developed non antagonist is a character who is off screen for nearly the entire book).  The stories' two* potential love interests are identifiable pretty quickly and early, but one barely has any character outside of his interactions with Camellia and the other's plotline is kind of stalker-ish (and gets worse from there).

*(It's possible that there is a third more interesting love interest that the book might develop in the sequel, but every time I thought the book might hint at going in that direction, it swerved hard away from it.  So I'm guessing not)

 More problematic is the fact that the book tries to develop a LOT of different plot threads at once and then never manages - despite not being a short novel - to actually resolve any of them, making the book at the end feel like more of a prologue to a more full story.  I compared the book to Persona above, but that book had at most 1-2 plot threads going at once and thus was a far more focused and successful novel, with each book being satisfying in and of itself.  The Belles on the other hand is very much not satisfying at the end, with basically no resolution to any plot arc (the one plot arc that sort of resolves does so in a way that there's no time for it to breathe and it immediately gets superseded by events in a different plot arc).

I've been critical in the past of the common trilogy plot structure that goes:
Book 1: Stand Alone with sequel hooks;
Book 2: Cliffhanger ending
Book 3: Final Resolution

But this book just goes straight to the cliffhanger ending in Book 1, and that's honestly worse since I have no reason to expect any resolution to come next book either (to compare with another book with a book 1 major cliffhanger, The Fifth Season, that book resolved two of its three major plot arcs quite completely, whereas this book resolves practically nothing).  And while the book isn't predictable in its ending, the major twist at one point of the ending is a bit too out of nowhere and I didn't think it worked.

In short, The Belles has a lot of interesting worldbuilding, but winds up not just not fulfilling its potential, but leaving a total mess.  Disappointing. 
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