Monday, March 30, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Belle Révolte by Linsey Miller




Belle Révolte is the latest young adult book from author Linsey Miller.  Miller's prior duology, the Mask of Shadows duology, was a series I really enjoyed (see my review of the first book here), and featured an incredible non-binary lead character, so I was really excited when I saw Miller's next book was coming out this year.  My excitement only increased when I saw that this novel features not one but two leading characters, as I was really fascinated to see what Miller would do after her brilliant characterization of her one lead in Mask of Shadows.

Belle Révolte did not disappoint, featuring a fantasy world with the trappings of the French Revolution, in which the use of magic is exploited in a way to only exacerbate class-conflicts, and two strong heroines in the middle of it.  Both heroines are excellent despite their differences, and Miller makes them both shine, even if some of the side characters are a little underdeveloped, and the world is really damn well done.  It's also, in unsurprising fashion after Mask of Shadows, a world featuring a number of LGBTQ characters, where the conflict is not at all about sexuality, even if it is about class.  In short, it's got great lead characters and a plot whose themes resonate strongly even today, making this one a definite winner.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
In the country of Demeine, noble girls are trained in the midnight arts of magic - illusion, scrying, and divinition.  Noble boys are trained in the noontime arts - magic for battle and healing - while commoners can at best serve as Hacks - magicians whose bodies are used by their superiors to bear the brunt of magic channeled through them, so the nobles can use magic with little harm.

Emilie des Marais is a young noble lady who dreams of being a physician and using the noontime arts, despite it being a forbidden path to her.  But on her way to a boarding school for those arts, she spots a commoner girl, Annette Boucher, who looks close enough to Emilie to be her sister.  Annette has always had a gift for magic, particularly the midnight arts, but her one experience with it led to disaster, and since then she has suffered the hard work of a common girl, in a family that could never understand her.  So when Emilie approaches her and suggests they swap places, Annette agrees and takes Emilie's place in the boarding school for the Midnight Arts, while Emilie acts as a common girl to try and become a Physician's Hack, or even better, an apprentice, as she always dreamed.

But both Emilie and Annette will discover through their deception that Demeine is a sick country, with the nobles oppressing and using the commoners for more than just their magic, and both find they cannot simply stand aside and let the horrors continue.  Yet when the King drives the nation to war and the two of them will discover a dark secret which threatens to change everything for them, and the nation forever - a secret which the powers that be will do everything to keep from getting out......
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Belle Révolte is told in first person perspective, alternating between Annette and Emilie's perspectives (with the story even including two epilogues to continue the scheme).  Both girls are similar in that they each want something their circumstances prevent them from having, but they aren't actually just opposites - whereas Emilie despises the idea of being forced into the Midnight Arts instead of the Noontime ones, Annette's couldn't care less about the divergence - her interests in magic are more in the fact that one commoner, Estrel, made herself into something by becoming a master of the midnight arts, and she wishes she could follow in her footsteps.  And while the two girls are from clearly different class backgrounds, the story doesn't take the easy route of having them each learn something about their respective class issues as a main idea of the story, all the while keeping class still as a major theme.

All this works to make both Emilie and Annette into excellent lead characters, which is good because while their stories are clearly interconnected, they're also each involved in separate plot arcs (complete with separate final boss encounters).  Emilie's work to become a Hack and perhaps an Apprentice to a Physician, does indeed reveal to her the plight of the commoner as you might expect, and she does have to reign in her haughtiness a bit, but it never goes fully away from her, and the book doesn't try to punish her for it.  Instead, the book focuses upon Emilie's horror at the atrocities committed by nobles who look down on others, and her efforts to try and stop them, along with her friends,, to go along with her rivalry (and eventual romance) with Charles, another physician's apprentice, and it all works really well.

Annette meanwhile is overwhelmed with power and the fear of being caught and of how the rich don't understand their wealth (as you might imagine), and as things move forward - she has a romance with a cook/alchemist who turns out to be a member of the resistance movement Laurel, she has to deal with learning more about the truths of the world from her scrying, she has to deal with potential discovery of who she is - she also firmly plants herself on a side that she means to use to help change the country.  I should add she's asexual but not aromantic, having a romance with the aforementioned cook/alchemist, and unsurprisingly Miller portrays this really well.  Anyhow, both Annette and Emilie's stories take their separate backgrounds and wishes and use them to build them both into strong characters willing to do what it takes to fight for their beliefs even in the face of insurmountable odds, even as it puts them and their friends in danger, and leaves them subject to exposure and betrayal.

The rest of the cast of the story isn't particularly well developed - best developed I think is Charles, the noble who is secretly a trans man and serves as Emilie's love interest, who also has similar beliefs about the world and strives to fight for it, since he knows his trans status means he isn't quite accepted in the world that is.  But the rest of the cast is really set aside for Emilie and Annette to shine, to the point where reveals and turns that characters have at times seem a little half-baked (one character reacts to learning a lead's identity with dismay in a sense that didn't quite work for me, for example).

Fortunately, the setting makes up for all that.  Demeine feels very much like France on the verge of revolution, with the revolutionary group Laurel stirring up trouble with posters that magically appear and a noble class that looks down upon anyone else.  Miller builds that up even more with the use of magic - commoners involved with magic tend to have their own bodies used as fuels for nobles' magic usage, with consequences you might expect....and consequences that are far more horrid and deadly.  The book also smartly acknowledges the fact that putting another royal on the throne might not be the best solution to it all, and knows how to tell a story about burning down a society whose class differences create oppression is the better move than trying to slowly change it, and it uses its two strong leads to realize that story.  It all ends in a satisfying fashion, although maybe a bit duplicative, and leaves a sequel hook in case Miller wants to revisit this world.

I hope she does, because in her last duology the side characters got vastly improved in the second book, and that's really the big issue here that could be fixed, and fixing it would lead to a really strong novel I'm sure.  Either way, Belle Révolte is a hell of a winner with its two leads and strong setting and theme, and I would definitely recommend it.
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