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A review by joceraptor
Blanca & Roja by Anna-Marie McLemore
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
as with most books i didn't love, a lot of this comes down to my expectations going in. so for some context: this is the fifth book i've read from anna-marie mclemore. their third published novel, when the moon was ours, is one of my favorite books. the beauty in their prose and the fabricated world really spoke to me and means that i generally have high hopes for their work. blanca & roja didn't work for me for several reasons.
i'll try and lay these out fairly because i do understand that this is a favorite for a lot of people.
first, what i expected from the title, blurb, and just general marketing of blanca & roja was a sister story. one of my biggest complaints is that pretty early on, blanca & roja - who we're told love each other so much that they've tried to share every aspect of their personality so that the swans can't choose between them - find themselves "competing" against one another and mostly due to a miscommunication. i don't love the miscommunication trope at the best of times and this one plays out for 300 pages and is then solved in 3. i was really hoping this story would be about sisterhood and we'd see these two fighting to be together, but i don't think we did. if anything, this felt more about the romance than about family.
secondly, as with their 2020 release, dark & deepest red, this is a multi-pov story where there isn't much distinction between the four speaking characters who all use first-person narratives. again, this is a thing i struggle with often, but if there are multiple pov, i personally need each to sound different.
third, i missed a driving force behind the story. mclemore often does character-focused magical realism, but it felt ill-fitting here. i think it needed something with a harder fantasy aspect and more plot-driven, especially considering that the subplot of why yearling disappeared and the bigger plot of the del cisnes being cursed felt like they belonged to two separate stories. there was a lack of urgency and stakes here that overall left me feeling disconnected and uninterested.
fourth and finally, to get really nitpicky and personal, i was let down by the negligence and sheer amount of violence from family members. i fully recognize that many people grow up in toxic homes. however, there was a bleakness here that put me off. blanca & roja's family only seemed to care about their daughters to the extent that one of them wouldn't be alive longer than 15 years because of this curse. on top of that, yearling's constant description of his cousin beating him black and blue got to a point that was gratuitous to me.
i must stress again that these are all me things. there's very little i find "objectively" bad here, it's just not at all what i wanted or needed from what i thought i was getting into.
i'll try and lay these out fairly because i do understand that this is a favorite for a lot of people.
first, what i expected from the title, blurb, and just general marketing of blanca & roja was a sister story. one of my biggest complaints is that pretty early on, blanca & roja - who we're told love each other so much that they've tried to share every aspect of their personality so that the swans can't choose between them - find themselves "competing" against one another and mostly due to a miscommunication. i don't love the miscommunication trope at the best of times and this one plays out for 300 pages and is then solved in 3. i was really hoping this story would be about sisterhood and we'd see these two fighting to be together, but i don't think we did. if anything, this felt more about the romance than about family.
secondly, as with their 2020 release, dark & deepest red, this is a multi-pov story where there isn't much distinction between the four speaking characters who all use first-person narratives. again, this is a thing i struggle with often, but if there are multiple pov, i personally need each to sound different.
third, i missed a driving force behind the story. mclemore often does character-focused magical realism, but it felt ill-fitting here. i think it needed something with a harder fantasy aspect and more plot-driven, especially considering that the subplot of why yearling disappeared and the bigger plot of the del cisnes being cursed felt like they belonged to two separate stories. there was a lack of urgency and stakes here that overall left me feeling disconnected and uninterested.
fourth and finally, to get really nitpicky and personal, i was let down by the negligence and sheer amount of violence from family members. i fully recognize that many people grow up in toxic homes. however, there was a bleakness here that put me off. blanca & roja's family only seemed to care about their daughters to the extent that one of them wouldn't be alive longer than 15 years because of this curse. on top of that, yearling's constant description of his cousin beating him black and blue got to a point that was gratuitous to me.
i must stress again that these are all me things. there's very little i find "objectively" bad here, it's just not at all what i wanted or needed from what i thought i was getting into.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence