Friday, May 31, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Everlasting Rose by Dhonielle Clayton



The Everlasting Rose is the sequel to "The Belles" by Dhonielle Clayton, a YA Fantasy featuring a world in which Beauty, and the control thereof, is the most important thing in the world.  I had mixed negative feelings about The Belles (my review is HERE), complaining mainly that the book set up a lot of interesting ideas and then never followed through on practically any of them, before ending on a major cliffhanger.  Still, the ideas were interesting in concept at least - even if the book lacked the greatest set of characters - so when my Hoopla library had the sequel, I did want to give it a try. 

And The Everlasting Rose is fine, I guess.  This book essentially resolves all the plot hooks from the The Belles (with some room left for another book I guess but there's no real cliffhanger) - but again never really spends enough time with any of the ideas for them to truly be examined and become interesting, with the book's theme about the obsession with societal standards of beauty being pretty clear and bluntly stated throughout.  Combined with a lack of characters with depth outside the main character, the book never really gives a reason for a reader to get that enthused with what's going on.  The book is never actually bad...it's just, fine.


-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------
Camille has come a long way from the young naive girl she once was, when she wanted nothing more than to be the Favorite of the Belles, the one who would bring beauty to the highest of nobles and royalty.  Now, together with her sisters Edel and Amber, as well as the bodyguard Remy she has started to love, she's on the run from the evil and mad Princess Sophia.  Sophia is set to be Queen unless someone can stop her, and Sophia plans to control the production and usage of Belles for all time in the future to give her full control of the worlds' beauty...and to ensure no one could possibly wind up more beautiful than her.  Camille knows that she and her sisters, with the power to alter another's inner and outer beauty, are a threat to Sophia and are thus in danger, but other than trying to find the missing Princess Charlotte, she has no clue what she can do to stop Sophia and save her family.

But as Camille scrambles for allies she can trust, she finds herself in the sights of the mysterious "Iron Ladies", a resistance movement of women who wish to remove the focus of society on Belle treatments for beauty - and to consider perhaps that everyone's natural gray state may not be offensive.  But while the Iron Ladies are no fans of Sophia, they're also no fans of the Belles who perpetuate the system they hate - so can Camille and her sisters really trust them?  And even if she can, can she really find a way to stop Sophia without running right into another of Sophia's deadly and merciless traps?
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The major theme of this series has been rather blunt and obvious from the start - that obsession with beauty, both internal and external - and fads as to what truly is beautiful, can lead to dangerous results.  The series exaggerates this point, and that's not really a problem in and of itself, as the series comes up with really interesting ideas through the process - beauty being both internal and external, the idea of growing beauty, the idea of people who reject the idea of using products to alter their appearance, the dangers of vanity, the cost of beauty and vanity being blood, etc.  The problem however, is that the book doesn't really execute upon these ideas very well.

I mean to stick with the positives at the start, Camille - our main character - is rather solid heroine, even if she's never really much more than that.  She's very much changed from her crazy naive self from the first book, where she was obsessed with becoming the favorite to the point where she overlooked some warning signs for a bit too long, and for the better.  And she's very smart about coming up with plans and improvising to deal with new situations, which makes her a lot easier to root for than I think in the first book.  And not really a character, but Camille's teacup dragons, basically palm-sized dragon pets that can be used for message carrying and other purposes, are just adorable.

Unfortunately, Camille is basically our only character with any interesting development.  Love interest Remy is dreadfully boring, and disappears about a quarter way through for most of the book to walk into what the reader will see coming as the most obvious trap ever.  The secondary love interest from the prior book, Auguste, reappears and is incredibly less interesting here, with the intrigue of his betrayal being completely disregarded.  Camille's sisters again get little development to make them clear distinct characters - we get to see Edel in particular for a good bit of this book, but she's just a nag who always doubts Camille's plans for pessimistic reasons and that's about it.  Which is kind of annoying because the first book teased that she had escaped the teahouses mysteriously so you'd think she might have something to do with the Iron Lady rebellion....except, no, she's just been hiding all that time, with her sole contribution being teaching Camille a new form of Belle magic.

Really, Edel and Auguste are examples of the biggest problems with this book - to the extent that characters have intriguing possibilities, the book instead opts for the most boring straightforward way of developing them.  So aside from Edel and Auguste above, Sophia - the main antagonist - remains just comically evil.  The Iron Ladies should be an interesting rebellion of people rejecting beauty, and their support of the princess Charlotte promises a potential future conflict....but this never comes to pass, and the teased conflict between the Iron Ladies and the Belles just never happens.  A version of this book that didn't spend its entire time from Camille's point of view could've allowed for actual development of these ideas and characters even if little changed in the plot, but with us tied to Camille's POV these things just are minor obstacles in the way of Camille's journey.  And then the final confrontation winds up being resolved with Camille using her powers in a suddenly game-breaking fashion that the book hasn't built up at all (or which would've completely eliminated much of the tension if Camille had demonstrated this ability earlier), that it's just....underwhelming.

I don't want to sound TOO negative - the reason I'm so down on this book is because there ARE so many interesting possibilities this book presents, and the book just fails to deliver on practically any of them.  The result is solid, don't get me wrong, but it's unremarkable, which is an absolute shame.

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