But the Grand Season has just begun and already Nina’s debut has gone disastrously awry. They are the Beautiful Ones, Loisail’s most notable socialites, and this spring is Nina’s chance to join their ranks, courtesy of her well-connected cousin and his calculating wife. Rose, New York Times bestselling author of the Reincarnationalist series ‘One of the most beautiful books I’ve read in a long time’ M. This tale intrigued and engaged me, and I will definitely be looking for further stories by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a sweeping romance rich with love and betrayal, with more than a dash of magic. While I wouldn’t have cared if Valeria had ended up dead by the end of the book, I was glad to see her disappear from the scene without causing her husband any further concern. The four characters’ romantic lives are somewhat entangled, but in the end, Hector and Nina are able to marry, and Valerie is separated from her husband, who’d been outraged when he learned that she had sought to have Hector killed in a duel by the young man with whom Nina had been about to become engaged. He sets out to earn sufficient money to woo her but in the meantime, because their relationship has been secret, she is obliged to marry Nina’s older cousin, Gaetan, who is of a wealthy family. Hector, unlike almost everyone else, doesn’t treat Nina’s telekinetic talent as a nuisance or something to be hidden away, but then he has made a considerable fortune at putting on shows demonstrating his talent after leaving his home town a talented yet penniless boy who had fallen in love with Valerie a decade earlier. She also grows into a very talented telekineticist. Nina, by contrast, is sweet, charming, and a young woman who grows to know her own mind and be certain of herself. Valerie is a poisonously jealous, possessive woman who seems never to have grown up and clearly has no idea how to be happy, and any compassion I initially felt for her was burned away by how vicious she became during the course of the tale. Nina and Hector are fascinatingly real characters – as is Valerie – and I disliked the latter almost more than I liked the two protagonists.
In fact, although a couple of the place names can be found on a map of France, so far as I can tell, it’s a secondary world story – although they have motorcars and cigarettes, trains and church-based religion.
Ah, I loved this book! It’s a Regency-style novel of manners – though it’s not set in Regency England.
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