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In the city of Orleans, everyone is born gray-skinned, red-eyed, and wrinkly, except for a handful of girls known as Belles. Through a combination of magical or advanced-tech tools and magic or mutant powers, the Belles have the ability to mold the gray people into beauties of any kind, though their work must be re-done on a monthly basis and is very painful.
Unsurprisingly, this creates a beauty-obsessed society and high demand for Belle services. One Belle is appointed the favorite, to serve at court; others are sent to teahouses. But what happens to the old Belles? And if you can make people beautiful, you can do other things to them as well…
The worldbuilding is very vivid. Is this a plausible-to-reality world that has the economics worked out? No. Is this a compelling vision of world that makes sense in its own fever-dream terms? Yes. Teacup pets like kitten-size lions and bears are popular, messages are sent by color-coded balloons, and fairy-tale motifs abound. In terms of atmosphere more than prose style, it’s much more reminiscent of Tanith Lee than of its more obvious inspiration, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I love setups in which it might be magic or might be advanced tech or might be both, and The Belles is all-in with that. Beauty standards are not white-centric, which is nice.
As far as I was concerned, the heroine and her specific story were just a window into the world, and I enjoyed the book on that basis. I have a fondness for this sort of candy-colored decadence. There’s an obligatory heterosexual love triangle but it’s perfunctory, which on the plus side means it doesn’t take up much space. Most of the relationships are between women and girls.
I suspect that this story could have been told as easily and well in one book as the two or more it will actually be, but I’m there for the sequel nonetheless. Bring on the teacup dragons!
Content notes: sexual assault, description of animal cruelty, mild-to-moderate body horror, death of a lesbian character (other lesbian or bi women survive), tabloid headline about a trans person transitioning via Belle that wasn’t negative about it but some readers were offended by how it was phrased.
Plot speculation: The Belles seem to be lab-created clones, so either they’re all clones of the original mutants or else the Belle abilities can be engineered in. This, plus the lack of Belles now as opposed to previously, suggests that either something is going wrong with the process or someone is deliberately rationing them.
That makes me wonder if the grayness is also deliberate. Is some shadowy cabal engineering society this way for profit or power?
The mamans all die right before their “daughters” are presented, so either they have a deliberate expiration date or are killed (most likely), or the Belles inherently don’t live long. I assume the Belles that don’t become mamans are all disfigured. Maybe if the mamans were allowed to live longer, they too would become disfigured?
I think the short lifespans of the Belles, whether by murder or expiration date, is deliberate and done so that the Belles will be a rare and prized commodity, and the people who control them will have power.
Spot the fairy tale reference! We have the magic mirror from Snow White, the sleeping princess from Sleeping Beauty, and more that I forget now.
The Belles
And the sequel:
The Everlasting Rose (Belles, The Book 2)
Unsurprisingly, this creates a beauty-obsessed society and high demand for Belle services. One Belle is appointed the favorite, to serve at court; others are sent to teahouses. But what happens to the old Belles? And if you can make people beautiful, you can do other things to them as well…
The worldbuilding is very vivid. Is this a plausible-to-reality world that has the economics worked out? No. Is this a compelling vision of world that makes sense in its own fever-dream terms? Yes. Teacup pets like kitten-size lions and bears are popular, messages are sent by color-coded balloons, and fairy-tale motifs abound. In terms of atmosphere more than prose style, it’s much more reminiscent of Tanith Lee than of its more obvious inspiration, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies. I love setups in which it might be magic or might be advanced tech or might be both, and The Belles is all-in with that. Beauty standards are not white-centric, which is nice.
As far as I was concerned, the heroine and her specific story were just a window into the world, and I enjoyed the book on that basis. I have a fondness for this sort of candy-colored decadence. There’s an obligatory heterosexual love triangle but it’s perfunctory, which on the plus side means it doesn’t take up much space. Most of the relationships are between women and girls.
I suspect that this story could have been told as easily and well in one book as the two or more it will actually be, but I’m there for the sequel nonetheless. Bring on the teacup dragons!
Content notes: sexual assault, description of animal cruelty, mild-to-moderate body horror, death of a lesbian character (other lesbian or bi women survive), tabloid headline about a trans person transitioning via Belle that wasn’t negative about it but some readers were offended by how it was phrased.
Plot speculation: The Belles seem to be lab-created clones, so either they’re all clones of the original mutants or else the Belle abilities can be engineered in. This, plus the lack of Belles now as opposed to previously, suggests that either something is going wrong with the process or someone is deliberately rationing them.
That makes me wonder if the grayness is also deliberate. Is some shadowy cabal engineering society this way for profit or power?
The mamans all die right before their “daughters” are presented, so either they have a deliberate expiration date or are killed (most likely), or the Belles inherently don’t live long. I assume the Belles that don’t become mamans are all disfigured. Maybe if the mamans were allowed to live longer, they too would become disfigured?
I think the short lifespans of the Belles, whether by murder or expiration date, is deliberate and done so that the Belles will be a rare and prized commodity, and the people who control them will have power.
Spot the fairy tale reference! We have the magic mirror from Snow White, the sleeping princess from Sleeping Beauty, and more that I forget now.
The Belles
And the sequel:
The Everlasting Rose (Belles, The Book 2)
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ETA: Any speculation on the stuff under my spoiler-cut?
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Anyway, my impression was that something had gone wrong with the process, and that they keep trying to make the Belles grow into a usable age more quickly to fill in for the acute Belle shortage, which was just making them die off sooner, spiraling the problem worse and worse. (Incidentally, how big is this kingdom, anyway? Because we have the six official Belles, and the four or five [the book is inconsistent on this point] teahouses, which have...a dozen to a score of unofficial Belles each, based on what we see at the Chrysanthemum Teahouse? Let's say 20 each at 5 teahouses, so a hundred unofficial Belles. Beauty appointments seem to take at least half an hour, so they're each seeing, what, a maximum of 32 people a day? But we're told every single citizen needs to have a beauty appointment every month and...okay, yes, I may be trying to apply more logic and math than is reasonable to this fairytale book.)
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I'm not sure the book is very consistent on this, but I thought the peasants couldn't afford beauty treatments. Maybe they get very quick, perfunctory ones that are nothing but "Okay skin is now some color other than gray, bye!"
I also really wondered about the size of the kingdom. I agree, math is a bit beside the point, but it would have to be pretty small. I also wonder WTF other countries, which presumably are not gray, think of it!
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...and apparently I find creepy love triangles more interesting than saccharine ones, for whatever that says about me.
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Yeah, that was the sense I got. And looking at the price list which the book makes sure to include, it looks like the price difference between going from Gris to normal looking person vs changing the "natural template" is a couple of orders of magnitude:
It looks like your basic skin color + hair color/texture + eye color restoration = ~180 ?spintria all together, while plastic surgery type modifications for each individual body part are 1200-5100.
I did also wonder about the size of the kingdom, and also about how their postal system with the balloons really worked, because that seemed really unwieldy, unless the kingdom is very small...
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You'd get Belles outside of the strictly rationed, lab-cloned supply?
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People don't seem particularly fussed about same-sex relationships in general (the queen and her lover, and doesn't the Fashion Minister openly say he's not into women, which is why it's totally non-scandalous for him to be alone with the Belles). There's also that scene where Ivy climbs into Camellia's bed For Secrecy, and whoever it is that discovers them chases her out because what if someone saw you! they might think you're having an incestuous relationship! But it seems like the incest would be the scandalous/gossip-worthy part, not the F/F implications. While a relationship with a boy got whatever past Belle they mentioned sent back to the Belle creche.
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Yeah, it's got to be an issue with procreative sex. I bet, as I said below, that they don't want people realizing that Belles could get pregnant and have more Belles, thus increasing the supply of Belles in a way not controlled by the state.
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