Holy pretty cover, batman.
Everybody knows, I think, that I love me a good dystopia.
Seriously, it just never seems to get old for me, I am always here for all of the
post-apocalyptic disaster stories. All the time. I’m not sure if The Belles, the first in a new series by
Dhonielle Clayton and published tomorrow is classed as dystopian or whether
it’s an alternative reality because I don’t think that’s ever explicitly
stated, but it felt dystopian to me, so that’s what we’ll go with. Teen feminist
dystopia. Is that a thing?
The premise is simple: in the opulent Orleans, everybody is
born grey and plain; only the Belles, a group of young girls, with a mysterious
set of powers can make a person beautiful. Belles have the ability to alter
every single last thing about a person, to order. In Orleans everybody wants to
be beautiful, beauty is valued higher than anything so the work of the Belles
is expensive and in demand. (Think The
Hunger Games district one here – that’s what Orleans and the people looked
like in my head I was reading anyhow.)
Camellia is a Belle. Every
few years the old set of Belles are retired and a new generation are brought
forward, a group from one of which is chosen to be the favourite, to live at
Court and to make the Royal Family beautiful. Camellia wants to be the
favourite.
BUT GUESS WHAT.
LIFE AT COURT, LIFE AS A BELLE, IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS.
Nothing, in fact, is what it seems.
(Also side note, the villains in this story were delicious:
everybody loves a real bad baddy,
right? This book has that.)
This book is fantastical and you need to suspend your belief
entirely going in and – slightly problematically for me actually because I am
all about the world-building – you’re kind of thrown in at the deep end with
not much explanation given to the whys and the hows and there wherefores. That
didn’t stop me guzzling this book down (although it doesn’t really get going
until about a third of the way in) but I won’t lie: I would have loved it more
had there been more background and more explanation; I’m always so greedy for
that stuff – I need to understand it to believe it and whilst I loved the
concept here, I couldn’t quite grasp how it would all work.
There’s a whole mythological element which I loved, and I’m really hoping that in the
rest of the series, that’s explored in a little more detail too, I’d also like
to see more of Orleans outside of the Royal Palace. Here’s hoping all my questions will be
answered in the sequel if I’m patient. I have so many questions, none of which
I am going to pose here because: spoilers.
On the whole that’s my overriding feeling I think; the ideas
Clayton touches on in this book fascinated me and I would have loved for them to have been explored in
more detail. It’s repetitive in places, and if I’m honest I did find it
dragging and that bugged me because I was so
intrigued – the whole idea of it, the world, the story, the characters, I
was fascinated by it all and so when I found myself feeling like I was reading
back over what I’d already read a couple of times I was frustrated: it didn’t quite reach its full potential for
me, and it’s such a shame because it could have been amazing if it had just had a little more depth. That said, I’ll be
keeping my little eyes peeled for the rest of the series because this is a book
full of secrets and lies and deceit; real proof that beauty is so much more
than skin deep, it’s message actually not that dissimilar to that of Scott
Westerfield’s Uglies. It’s an
interesting concept, and its cleverly told with so much of it familiar if
extreme – it’s a really interesting study in what it means to be ‘beautiful,’
what ‘beautiful’ looks like and the values society places on that. Not just the
desperation to be the latest version of beautiful, but how the Belles are seen
as commodities rather than people, the way they are expected to give up
everything about themselves for what they believe to be some Greater Good,
although in reality that’s all smoke and mirrors and the reality is much more
sinister. I loved it.
Most of all, I wish post balloons were a thing.
