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claudiaqreads 's review for:
The Beautiful Ones
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
4.5 rounded up! Its been a while since I read Jane Austen but like major Jane Austen vibes for this book. With bonus superpowers!
The Beautiful Ones follows our main characters in an basically Victorian-esque society with a few twists. Though actually its like the 20s since there are cars so maybe the JA vibes were too powerful for me to properly place this in time? Uh anyways. Hector comes to the city in order to chase a long lost love, Valerie who married a rich man instead of poor Hector ten years ago. Hector on his journey to get back to Valerie meets Nina, who turns out to be the cousin of Valerie’s husband. Hector begins courting Nina in order to get closer to Valerie. Also they have telekinesis.
Nina is our absolutely wonderful main character. Her kindness and innocence shines through and I wanted to take her away from literally every character in this book who used her to their own ends. I kind of read her as neurodivergent, though that could probably be debated. Either way, she was great and interesting character to fall in love with.
Hector is Darcy.
Valerie is this character that actually started more interesting than she ended. Valerie has been emotionally corrupted by the situations she grew up in. She was forced by situation to marry for money instead of love and this left a black mark on her. By the end of the novel though she devolves so deeply into villainy to feel cartoonish. Like she could be wearing a coat of Dalmatians in the final scenes.
The love story really was such a nice slow burn and left me at times wanting them to be together forever or for Nina to run away and never see these people again. The emotional journey is powerful and pulls you along with it so easily.
There is nothing really new here but Silvia Garcia-Moreno seems to have a skill in taking well tread paths of stories and breathing new life into them with simply wonderful writing and adding supernatural twists. I really loved this.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Imani Jade Powers (wow what a cool name). It was a great audiobook and I highly recommend!
The Beautiful Ones follows our main characters in an basically Victorian-esque society with a few twists. Though actually its like the 20s since there are cars so maybe the JA vibes were too powerful for me to properly place this in time? Uh anyways. Hector comes to the city in order to chase a long lost love, Valerie who married a rich man instead of poor Hector ten years ago. Hector on his journey to get back to Valerie meets Nina, who turns out to be the cousin of Valerie’s husband. Hector begins courting Nina in order to get closer to Valerie. Also they have telekinesis.
Nina is our absolutely wonderful main character. Her kindness and innocence shines through and I wanted to take her away from literally every character in this book who used her to their own ends. I kind of read her as neurodivergent, though that could probably be debated. Either way, she was great and interesting character to fall in love with.
Hector is Darcy.
Valerie is this character that actually started more interesting than she ended. Valerie has been emotionally corrupted by the situations she grew up in. She was forced by situation to marry for money instead of love and this left a black mark on her. By the end of the novel though she devolves so deeply into villainy to feel cartoonish. Like she could be wearing a coat of Dalmatians in the final scenes.
The love story really was such a nice slow burn and left me at times wanting them to be together forever or for Nina to run away and never see these people again. The emotional journey is powerful and pulls you along with it so easily.
There is nothing really new here but Silvia Garcia-Moreno seems to have a skill in taking well tread paths of stories and breathing new life into them with simply wonderful writing and adding supernatural twists. I really loved this.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Imani Jade Powers (wow what a cool name). It was a great audiobook and I highly recommend!