This book was so exquisite and exciting. I loved everything about it, the pacing, the writing, the characters, the story. It was so enjoyable to read something new and fresh!

"Things growing just live in us," she said.

I should have reviewed this weeks ago when I finished it, but I didn't know how. This book nestled itself so deep into my heart, and left me speechless every time I tried to put my thoughts down in words. Anna-Marie McLemore is a brilliant, beautiful artist who has painted the most lovely images, and sculpted the most precious lives, in this story.

In this family, broken hearts were passed down like lockets. And Estrella had been enough a fool to think she could refuse the one meant for her simply by not opening her hands.

The Nomeolvides women are cursed to lives of growing beautiful things outside of them, while everything beautiful inside of them is turned to dust by heartbreak and loss. The imagery of their heartache is painted so brilliantly that I spent the majority of my time reading Wild Beauty trapped somewhere between rapture and sorrow.

You see, the women have been cursed by the land that shelters them: each time a Nomeolvides woman falls in love, she will lose her to lover - either he leaves, or disappears. In the beginning of our story, all five of the youngest generation learn that they have each fallen in love with the same girl, and so, they decide that none of them can have her. Things change when a strange young man is returned from the ground for the first time, and the cousins must determine if a doomed love is worth it.

He was the chance that the raw will of La Pradera was stronger than the curse they passed down like antique lace.

Though Estrella, too, begins the story in love with the same young woman her cousins have fallen for, it's quickly evidenced that something is blooming between her and Fel, the boy she pulled from the ground. These two are so precious and wonderful together, and I just wanted to protect them from harm so badly! Their exchanges range anywhere from silly banter to the most adorable moments of endearment and intimacy, and I loved every bit of it.

Estrella had fallen in love twice. They had been different not because one was a woman and one was a boy, but because one was Bay and one was Fel.

More than anything, this book is diverse: it is beautifully queer, with lovely brown women (and men) who I can say absolutely nothing negative about. I obviously cannot speak for the racial representation as it isn't my place, but I can speak for the bisexual rep, and tell you that it moved me to shameless tears. It was one of the purest and most authentic representations of my sexuality that I have ever come across, and so much of what was said rang so true. If anyone asked me for a brilliant representation of bisexuality in fiction, I would immediately point them to the passage I pulled this quote from. <3

What shamed a girl was, in a boy, so often worth showing off.

Not only is Wild Beauty beautifully diverse, but it is also feminist as hell. There are multiple instances in which the Nomeolvides women express their frustrations at the double standards facing them, and I found myself grinning and nodding along at more than one of the comments registered against the sexist ideals forced upon women.

"Then wreck me," he said.

Not to be silly or dramatic, but this book wrecked me. It put me into the first - and worst - book hangover I've had in a long time, and as I'm writing this review, all I want to do is dive right back in and read it all over again! Anna-Marie McLemore has instantly been placed on my "auto buy" list and I can't wait to read more of her work. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Thank you to NetGalley and Feiwel & Friends for granting me this wonderful ARC in exchange for an honest review.

When I got this book, I was not expecting the wonder and magic that would fill me while reading it. Each page was a beautiful poem given to nature and to love. Following the stories, the struggle of the Nomeolvides women was overpowering. Their doomed love stories, but also all their family connections. The little things that made them specials. And then comes Fel', mysterious, dangerous for their heart, but also maybe a path to redemption. We discover the family members with him, we see their magic with his eyes. And always, this poetry in the writing. I was captivated from the first page by all the descriptions Anna-Marie McLemore does. She has a great talent, she will take you into her world, keeping a piece of your heart with her.

Love grows such strange things.

For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They’ve also hidden a tragic legacy: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens.

The boy is a mystery to Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, and to her family, but he’s even more a mystery to himself; he knows nothing more about who he is or where he came from than his first name. As Estrella tries to help Fel piece together his unknown past, La Pradera leads them to secrets as dangerous as they are magical in this stunning exploration of love, loss, and family. (via Goodreads)

I received an eARC of Wild Beauty from Netgalley, courtesy of Feiwel and Friends publishing, in exchange for an honest review.

I’m gonna come right out and say it. I loved this book from start to finish EVEN THOUGH I had to read it on my phone. This book absorbed me from the first minute, and made me want to learn all of La Pradera’s secrets.

This book is slow and lyrical, so if that isn’t your style, you probably won’t enjoy it. However, it is extremely my style, so I’m gonna talk about why I loved it.

One thing that was very different about this story is that the plot isn’t the main focus – the setting is. The setting is La Pradera, a former quarry that generations of Nomeolvides women have turned into an overflowing garden. La Pradera is as much a character as any of the Nomeolvides women or Fel, and I loved it.

“Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.

Love grew such strange things.”

Another part of this novel that drew me in was its discussions of different types of loves. Each of the cousins loved each other, loved their aunts and grandmothers, and loved Bay. Each of those loves was entirely different, even in the way La Pradera saw it. I really enjoyed the strong family dynamic in this novel, with the cousins all being as close as if they were sisters.

One thing that I found weird was that it felt like McLemore was trying to make Bay either genderqueer or nonbinary, which was never fully realized in the novel. It was just hinted at and never explained.

Aside from that, I really enjoyed this novel. If it sounds like the kind of garden you want to wander through, I highly recommend picking up a copy from Amazon or Indiebound!

https://www.bustle.com/p/anna-marie-mclemores-wild-beauty-is-a-magical-story-of-love-loss-family-curses-2460255

Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore was just a fantastic read. I enjoyed the storyline and the characters of this book.

This book was magical and loved the romance in this book. I loved seeing all the families connected but also with the growth of flowers. I loved the romance between the cousins but also seeing the loves come back. I also enjoyed seeing many different types of love in this book.

3.5 stars - First of all, something needs to be said for the writing. It's absolutely lovely, and flowery in all sense of the word (hah, see what I did there?) Ugh. It's as if Anna-Marie painted the flowers themselves. The woman can make your mouth water. If you're a writer, this is a must read, much like Laini Taylor's Strange the Dreamer. I actually really loved Anna's other book, 'The Weight of Feathers'.

But if you are a reader looking for a fast-paced story, look elsewhere. It put me to sleep nearly every time I started reading it. The story is very slow moving and abstract, so go into it with the right expectations. The thing is... gah. You guys. As much as I loved the writing, so much of it was repetitive. Literally, the same sentence written over and over again, just with different words. And okay - it totally works in some instances. I get that. But it was too much for my personal taste. It was meant to be lyrical, which it was, but slowwwww.

All that said, there's a lot to love about this story. The characters were lovely, as usual with McLemore's stories, though there were way too many family members for me to keep them straight. I absolutely adored Estrella and Fel, and I rooted for them, but I was expecting a more realistic plot twist. I dunno. That part fell a little short for me. A bit predictable. And a few other things left a sour taste in my mouth, though it was only minor details.

I also feel like I learned some things and my heart broke for the characters many times over, but again... I feel like I would be raving so much more if the pace had been even.

Anyway, what it boils down to, is I feel the same way about this as I did 'Strange the Dreamer'. I think it's a book many will love and cherish, and others will simply DNF because of the pace. Decide if you're the type of reader who is OK with an abstract, low moving plot, and if you are, check this out.

A lush, beautiful, heart breaking story of family and past secrets with some of the most gorgeous writing I've read in a long time.

It took me a bit to get into book and sort all the characters (there are a lot of names, especially at the beginning to adjust to), and it drug a little in parts for me, but the ending. Oh my goodness, the ending. I can't even deal with how perfect and fantastic the ending is. The ending brought everything together in ways that I couldn't imagine. Absolutely stunning. I definitely need to read the rest of the author's books.

Calling Anna-Marie McLemore’s writing lush and beautiful isn’t exactly original, but damn if it isn’t the best way to describe her writing. It is really lush and beautiful – she creates these worlds you feel like you can just sink into and this was such a lovely read that made my heart ache. Like the cover, the writing is absolutely beautiful, while still peeling back layers of ugly things in society. The family dynamic is wonderful - cousins who are like sisters and mothers and grandmothers all raising everyone. The romantic relationship isn’t the biggest part of the story, but dear god there’s a line right at the end that killed me. I’m just gonna repeat myself and say that this book is absolutely beautiful and everyone should read it.

Wild Beauty is a fairytale - a story of a family of women, their connection to the land and a tragic legacy that sees their lovers vanish.

Admittedly, I was taken in, firstly, by the gorgeous cover art design, which is simply stunning. Then I was drawn in by McLemore’s beautiful storytelling style, which is descriptive and lyrical, and totally evokes a fairytale-like feeling while reading the book. It’s not a retelling - it stands on its own, and is wonderful.

Told in dual perspectives, we unravel the stories of two very different individuals: Estrella, a Nomeolvides girl charged with maintaining the enchanting gardens of La Pradera, like all the women in her family before her, and Fel, a boy who mysteriously appears in those gardens with no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. The gardens themselves hold dangerous secrets and magic of their own.

I loved the family aspect of Wild Beauty; very early on we learn the make-up of Estrella’s family: she’s the second-youngest of five young women living on the estate, all of them sisters and cousins, all of them born of sisters and cousins, going back generations. Their magic is an innate part of their family, carried on through the females in their family, and these women take care of each other, no matter what. Throughout the story, the family ties are tested and time and time again, the women band together to support one another.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the way gender and relationships were written in this story: at the beginning of the book, Estrella and her 4 sisters/cousins are all in the love with the same young woman, Bay - a young woman who doesn’t conform to female stereotypes. While they’re in love with Bay, many of them have also had relationships with men, too, and while there is some discussion around the older women in their family not approving of their love of Bay, it’s mostly around the family curse, rather than from a place of prejudice. It was just lovely to read something that didn’t feel like the characters had to conform to one particular relationship type.

Overall, this is a beautiful story that totally captivated me from start to finish. I gave Wild Beauty 4.5 out of 5 stars.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I read [book:When the Moon Was Ours|28220826] this summer and fell in love with it. I've requested it multiple times to people so when I saw that McLemore had another book coming out, I knew I had to read it as soon as possible!

McLemore didn't disappoint. Actually, I think I fell in love with her writing even more in this book. <i>Wild Beauty</i> is a beautifully written magical realism novel about a family of women who are cursed. Their lovers tend to vanish so the youngest group of Nomeolvides girls attempt to guard their hearts to prevent the curse from happening.

The Nomeolvides girls have tended to the La Praeda gardens for generations; the curse hovering over each woman suffers a broken heart. They reach deep into the ground and call forth gorgeous flowers but not once have they been able to bring up anything else from the dirt until a boy is uprooted. He has a past he cannot recall and the Nomeolvides are determined to help him unearth it.

There was such gorgeous descriptive language that provided the ethereal setting of the garden; so much that the garden became a character itself. I adored each character, even the ones I despised, if that makes sense. If you love The Raven Boys, Bone Gap, or have read McLemore's other works, pick this one up immediately.

Another gorgeous story by McLemore! I was not disappointed and this is certain to be the next must-read.

I'm definitely one of the black sheep when it comes to Wild Beauty. Despite every attempt to love this book, I struggled to get through it. 

This is one of those books where the prose is gorgeous. . . but it covered up flat characters. My biggest problem with Wild Beauty is that I couldn't care less about the characters. They were beautifully created. I can't speak to the bisexual rep in this book as I don't identify as such so take the fact that I loved it with a grain of salt. There's such a strong family theme as well which I don't see often enough in YA so more points to you, Wild Beauty. 

Yet I couldn't tell you who my favorite character was. I couldn't tell you which one I shipped with that one. I couldn't tell you what I loved about them. Because I never connected with these characters. I never felt anything for them, became invested in them. I've said this with other books in the past and I'll say it again with this one: if I can't connect with the characters, I won't enjoy the book. It's who I am as a reader. And I couldn't get behind these characters enough to care what happened to them.

To be fair, not that much really happened in this book. It just plods along with all the flowery description but little action until the end where there's some attempt at making it a cohesive flowing story when there wasn't much to go off of. I guess I never got the point of this book. I like a story that has an end goal. The heroine completes her quest. The prince takes down the empire. You know that there's an end of some kind, a task to be completed. Perhaps it's more a personal preference but I don't like stories that are more. . . open. 

With that, I want to fall into the book. I want to feel the magic. And I actually really liked the world of Wild Beauty -- or at least what it could have been. The idea of this family of 5 women in each generation rooted to this home where they grow flowers, that just intrigues me. But while there's this magic going on, I wasn't grounded in the world. There was plenty of description but not enough detail, if that makes sense. It comes back to the writing style. Lots of flowery language but not necessarily substance. 

When it comes down to it, this book bored me. I contemplated DNFing a few times because it just didn't hold my attention. I need more action in a book BUT it doesn't mean I wouldn't recommend this book. If you don't need as much action and are looking for a book with rich family themes and an amazing diverse cast of characters, then I think you'll really enjoy this book. For me, it just wasn't what I was expecting and I ended up being disappointed.

This book had beautiful and lovely writing. But I just didn't connect with the story and characters as I would like to have. I loved the beginning when Fel appears and doesn't know who he is, though!

4.5/5 STARS!!

If I could use only one word to describe this book it would be beautiful. This tale, the characters, the writing - everything about this story was absolutely beautiful.

This was my first time reading a book written by Anna-Marie McLemore even though I have had When The Moon Was Ours on my TBR for a long time. Thanks to Netgalley, I was offered an eARC by the publishers and finally got around to exploring Anna's writing style - I have got to say I immediately fell in love with it. I am aware that although her descriptive writing style may not be up to everyone's tastes, I would still recommend giving this story a go purely because of the amazingly crafted characters! Fans of Laini Taylor would especially enjoy her writing style in my opinion ♥️

I loved the dual POV from Estrella and FEL OMG - MY HEART GOES OUT TO THIS BOY Y'ALL!! I loved his chapters soooo much!! He was such a mystery to me and (to himself sigh) but I especially loved the romance ahhhh my fangirling heart is content :) I also loved the diversity and lgbt representation in this story - I personally haven't come across many books with bisexual representatives before but I'll definitely keep my eye out for more in the future!

I normally get bored by the information dump about history or background in novels, but for some reason I was really interested in the history of the Nomeolvides women and wasn't bored. The bond between the cousins and Fel's opinions of himself really touched my heart and it was just such a nice tale, I would say it definitely lived up to my expectations since this was one of my most anticipated reads of the year!

I have only read a few books with the themes of magical realism before but I think this genre is really growing on me! I really enjoyed the magical aspects and the fact that everything came into a full circle in the end :') If you're looking a heartwarming and mysterious tale that will hold your interest right till the end, then make sure to pick this one up ♥️

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group and Feiwel & Friends Candlewick for the ARC, Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore. I just love the way Anna-Marie McLemore writes, the title for this third novel is perfect! There is such gorgeous worldbuilding with the gardens of the Nomeolvides women consisting of grandmothers, mothers, and cousins who are bound to the land of La Pradera where to leave is to die. The flowers, their colors, their beauty (and magic) Estrella and her cousins nurture was also a restrictive world where generations of Nomeolvides women have been cursed and their lovers (male or female) were punished by disappearing forever. Estrella and her cousins, Azalea, Gloria, Calla, and Dalia are all fiercely in love with Bay Briar, whose grandmother owned the lands and gardens of LaPradera. Would their gifts to LaPradera spare Bay from their venomous hearts? Estrella finds a boy who has no memory of who he is or where he comes from. Together, the Nomeolvides women decide this boy, Fel, is a gift - maybe he is going to save LaPredera and hopefully bring back their lovers. They all decide to love him as a brother. So begins McLemore’s stunning novel with her special kind of magical realism in plot, setting, imagery, dialogue, and language. This book was lush, full of confusion, lies, secrets and the drama of families, loss, and love. I could not put down this mesmerizing world of flowers, willful Nomeolvides women, Fel’s grasping for memories and loving the Nomeolvides women. Highly recommended!

A beautifully written book about 5 cousins whose family can't leaver La Padera or they will die. These remarkable young women can grow the flower of their name sake at will. The cousins and their mothers live together tending the garden and are determined never to fall in love. For if they do their loved one will disappear forever.

I loved the magical realism and LGBTQ touch.

McLemore's writing only gets better and better. The story is lush and magical and the characters are fully realized and memorable.