The Beautiful Ones Pits Manners Against Magic
There is often an awfulness to pretty things. Roses have their thorns, poetry its dirges, Shakespeare his tragedies. Even the prettiest people hide their own ugly little secrets.
Those secrets come home to roost in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Beautiful Ones, an intimate period fantasy as concerned with the rules of etiquette its protagonist continually breaks as it is the telekinetic powers she possesses.
In two previous novels, the nostalgic coming-of-age tale Signal to Noise and last year’s vampire noir Certain Dark Things, Moreno-Garcia has given us wildly different takes on Mexico City, each exotic, intriguing, and magical in its own way. She has moved through magical realism and urban fantasy to land here, in a fantasy of manners in a far different locale: an enchanting alternative world that hews closest to 19th-century France.
Though it may depart in setting and subgenre, The Beautiful Ones demonstrates Moreno-Garcia’s smart and colorful writing, with descriptions both sensory and sumptuous, and characters you will root for, even in their worst moments.
Antonina Beaulieu is a young, moneyed fish-out-of-water lost in the world of Losail’s city sophisticates. Headstrong and honest as the day is long, Nina has been sent to the city to attract a suitor. To do so, she’s put under the tutelage of her cousin Gaetan and his icy socialite wife, Valérie.
Valérie is a harsh taskmaster, with standards the boisterous and outdoorsy Nina can never hope to meet; she is one of the titular Beautiful Ones, the old-money aristocrats who rule this prim-and-proper society. Begrudgingly, she trudges Nina from party to parlor and beautician to ballroom in the hopes of making a “lady” of her yet. For her part, Nina would rather be collecting beetle specimens or attending natural history lectures.
What’s worse for Nina are her oft-unwieldy telekinetic abilities, which alienate her from everyone who might be inclined to seek her out. No matter how wealthy your family, it’s hard to nab a beau when he’s worried you’ll shatter the glassware in a fit of boredom. That sort of thing sets the gossipy tongues wagging.
None of this changes when the mysterious Hector Auvray enters the picture, and yet, everything does: Hector is a popular performer who wields his powers with far more control than Nina, and he takes an interest in her unconventionality.
Whether Hector’s interest stems from Nina’s unique qualities or her relationship to Valérie drives this story of romance, heartache, and palace intrigue. The journey is layered and endlessly elegant, in ways that make even Valérie’s brittle hostility the subject of empathy.
The complex dynamics between the two women elevate the narrative above the standard love triangle, and the story belongs to no single character—it belongs to all of them; and to the setting, lush and stifling by turns, its magic subtle yet tangible; and to the stringent rules of the society in which they operate.
Nina’s struggle is not to fit in with the Beautiful Ones, but to survive their dismissiveness and derision. Hector’s fight is between his past and future. In Valérie, we have the conflict between outer perfection and inner pollution. Each of these battles is waged from the glossy streets of Losail to the quiet country serenity of a country estate, with ever escalating stakes.
In this world, a woman may have only her reputation, as Valérie chides Nina, but The Beautiful Ones has so many more layers than that.
The Beautiful Ones is available October 24.