Review - "The Belles"

The Belles, The Belles #1
by Dhonielle Clayton
rating: ☆
published: 6th February 2018
spoilers? big ones

Goodreads

Galley provided by publisher

I meant to wait a little while until I was less angry about this book, but I don't see that happening anytime soon, to be quite honest. Actually, scratch angry. I'm fucking furious. I have never been gladder to have been spoiled a character death in my life.

This book is bury your gays. There we go. I said it. It's bury your gays.

In this book, there are two (potentially three) sapphic characters. One of them is in love with one of her attendants but, this being an inadvisable and socially wrong match, nothing can happen between them. That's already a tragic gay story, so excuse me if I'm not sympathetic to anything more.

Unfortunately, a lot more happens. The princess (cruel, slightly unstable, generally just horrible and sadistic) decides that Claudine has to marry a man. And this man is a gross attempted rapist. So that's bad enough. And great, we get to see (once again) that the princess is horrible and cruel and should not be allowed to rule.

But it doesn't stop there. Oh no. The princess decides that two Belles have to change Claudine's appearance, each three times, as a competition to find this gross fuck of a man's favourite look. And they push it so hard Claudine dies. There's plenty of comments earlier in the book about how painful the Belles' work is, so essentially Claudine is tortured to death. And this happens in front of everyone.

And the only point to this scene is so those Belles, Camille and Amber, can be accused of murder. That's it. It would have been so so so easy not to have had the character be Claudine, but no. Apparently, even in this fantasy universe, LGBT characters are not allowed anything near a happy ending. Instead, they get tortured to death for a cruel princess's power kick.

What we end up with is yet another gay character being murdered (1) for cishet pain, (2) to show how cruel the villain is (and note that she's already been shown to be cruel many times over), (3) for the tragedy, and (4) FOR NO FUCKING REASON.

I am so incredibly furious at this book. But I am also glad beyond belief that I went into the book having been spoiled for this character's death. Not how, but at least that it happens. Because it was fucking awful reading about it having known it was coming, I wouldn't wish anyone to read it without foreknowledge.

Besides that, I had some more mundane problems too. The plot was kind of boring for the best part of 450 pages. Honestly, if you're going to have a book that long, get things moving a bit quicker. There was the occasional hook to keep you interested, but I really just skimread most of it. Maybe it didn't help that I knew about the spoiler beforehand, but also I read one chapter and realised I didn't actually like the premise. So it wasn't an auspicious start. The writing was occasionally purple prosey, but overall pretty good. As for the characters, I only liked three of them and they hardly really appeared (and one of them died, so thanks for that).

All that might ordinarily have lead me to rate this book 2 stars, but then that happened and I was too angry to ever rate it higher than 1. Honestly, it doesn't even deserve that many.