The Belles

[psocoptera]

The Belles, Dhonielle Clayton, 2019 Lodestar nominee. This book was like the makeover scene in Hunger Games only it went on for 400 pages (and I was ready for kids to start killing each other after about 20). I kind of feel bad about how little I enjoyed this book - I liked the author's note at the end, I support what Clayton was trying to do here and I hope it was more effective for actual teens than for my middle-aged self. And I really do love that three of the Lodestar books this year have Black girls on the cover; I like to imagine bookstore owners and teen-section librarians setting up Lodestar displays and there they are. (I have no idea whether any bookstores or librarians actually care about the Lodestar but the publishing industry has such a shitty track record on people of color on covers, I think it's great if the Hugos can chip in a little to that ongoing struggle.)

Some more specifics about how this book didn't work for me and why I think it might have/should have behind the cut. Also, hey, notes for torture and animal harm, I mean I don't discuss the animal harm here but it's in the book.

So, teen magical beauticians, whatever, except right at the 25% point the information is casually dropped that they're *accelerated-growth clones*, which, OKAY, cool, now we're getting somewhere, and that's right around the right point for breakout, the point at which everything is set up and now the plot is going to go boom and the story kick into higher gear. Only... it didn't, just kept plodding along, and the clones-from-vats thing was never mentioned again until near the very end when it was confirmed, but it still wasn't *driving* anything? And, like, I think there's an interesting story in "storm troopers, but they're girls and part of this beauty-compliance system instead of war, what if the heroine was basically Finn and realized she was part of something fucked up and had to figure out how to get out and then decide what to do about it". Or "it's Ender's Game, here's how this kid has been ruthlessly raised and manipulated to do what these adults need her to do, only the arena is doing hair and makeup instead of killing." What if we could tell those stories about social violence instead of murder violence. Any of that could be interesting. But instead the story loses track of the whole "naive narrator slowly realizes she's a cog in an awful machine" conflict and gets bogged down in "by the way this one particular person happens to be a cruel sociopath, *she's* the real problem (and not all the other people we've already seen be complicit in various ways, or the way this system has apparently been operating for centuries)." Randomly eeevil antagonists are boring, sorry. (Yes I'm sure there are exceptions, this wasn't one of them.)

I also felt like the story didn't do a very good job of making us sympathetic to the protag - I mean, I just said that she's clearly been raised to be a cog in the system, I get that, but she's just so passive and helpless for so much of the book. Finn works because we come in to his plot right at his realization and then it's all his arc towards rebellion from there and Ender works because he's trying *so hard* but it's all part of the big chess game. Camellia is the kind of protag who realizes that there's a whole bunch of stuff she doesn't know and gets handed a book that might have helpful information and instead of frantically skimming the thing, occasionally reads one page and then thrusts it away from her and has feelings. She gets blushy over a boy who is *obviously up to no good* and we have to listen to her thinking things like "could this be Love??" instead of "huh, how *do* I feel about being a magical construct with a dramatically shortened lifespan compared with the people I was made to serve, am I good with that or not?" which, like, *seems like something you might want your character to have some engagement with*?? Like, how do you just not have self-reflection and identity questions be part of the characterization in a YA novel. And then, least forgivably, late in the book when you'd think she might by now be ready to find herself/be strong/be awesome/whatever, she instead lets the antagonist threaten her into torturing a sympathetic character to death with her magic.(Sympathetic lesbian character whose secret girlfriend has to watch, btw.) Yikes. I think there are really powerful stories that can be told about protags who are influenced to do terrible things, like say the Chaos Walking books. But the Chaos Walking books give those terrible things their full moral weight? And here the torture-murder is almost in passing, the protag hardly thinks again about having killed this girl, except for how the antagonist "tricked" her into doing something that gave her an excuse to throw her in the dungeon, oh woe, what will happen to poooor protag. And I get that Camellia was scared, and her sister was threatened, and she thought she could keep the torture within their social norms for pain from beauty treatments, and it was her sister who really lost control and killed the girl. But it just felt like that was her moment to be a hero, to refuse, to resist, and when she finally *does* do something (one thing, one real action that moves the plot instead of being carried along by it) it didn't feel brave or clever or important enough to balance that earlier weight of complicity. Like, at least in Heathers Winona eventually stops the whole school from blowing up, right?

Comments

Loathed this book

[vardibidian]

I don't know why I finished reading this one—I hated it from the very beginning, and I gave up on any optimistic notion that I was going to like it any better by about a third of the way through. I thought it was unpleasant at the character and at the prose levels, and the messages were both oversignaled and muddled. And for a book that was (I think) about the detrimental obsession with "beauty", it really seemed to relish the physical descriptions.

Anyway, this was the only book I have disliked all the way through and kept going to the end for some years. There were a couple of others that I wound up disliking, mostly because of the endings, and a lot that I have ditched partway through, but this was the first I finishe despite hating it from the beginning since... the life of Tao? That's about five years.

Thanks,
-V.

Re: Loathed this book

[psocoptera]

I finished it because I had a hard time giving up hope that something interesting might happen. And, honestly, because I knew I was biased against it - I really hate "beauty" stuff, I had an actual wake-up-with-heart-pounding nightmare about being forced into a "makeover" once, I knew I was going to have a hard time with a character for whom that was so central - and I wanted to try to give it as fair a read as I could.

[katherine]

Thanks for the review. I am slowly reading this one now (tired by all the food similies so far, of all things to be tired at), after accidentally getting Belles by Jen Calonita from the library instead and disappointed at the lack of makeovers in that one.