Review by New York Times Review
'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Beowulf' get a fresh look. Three fairy tales become a tale of two magical sisters. IF THERE'S ONE staple of entertainment these days, it's the adaptation. TV shows are drawing inspiration from books ("My Brilliant Friend" and "The Haunting of Hill House"). Movies are reinventing treasures of the past, sometimes from a studio's own vault (looking at you, Disney). And novels, especially ones for the young adult audience, are reworking classic stories that came before them. These three novels put a contemporary twist on canonical tales about young people facing the challenges of building their own futures. IBI ZOBOI'S CHARMING PRIDE (Balzer + Bray, 304 pp., $17.99; ages 12 and up) isn't an adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" so much as a "remix" of Jane Austen's tale of unexpected love, as the novel's cover says. Instead of Elizabeth, we meet Zuri, a high school student living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She has her life mapped out: When she graduates, Zuri wants to go to Howard University, where she hopes to collect the "wisdoms found in old, dusty books written by wrinkled brown hands ... and take them with me back home to sprinkle all over Bushwick like rain showers." Boys aren't a part of the plan. That all changes when the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street. Darius Darcy, their aloof son, quickly becomes Zuri's nemesis. But despite a rough start, Zuri and Darius soon find a relationship brewing. "Pride" winks continually at its source material: Instead of the "Bennet" family, we meet the "Benetiz" family, "Jane" becomes "Janae," "Lady Catherine de Bourgh" becomes "paternal grandmother, Mrs. Catherine Darcy" and so on. One pleasure of the book, then, is watching how the blistering romance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy maps onto characters so different from Austen's original creations. Yet that steadfast loyalty to Austen is also the biggest hurdle the book faces. By adhering so closely to the plotting of its source material, "Pride" can be a bit predictable, even to readers with only a cursory knowledge of "Pride and Prejudice." Instead, the more compelling and unexpected romance of the novel is not the courtship between Zuri and Darius: It's the love story between Zuri and her home, a neighborhood threatened by gentrification. Rather than simply say gentrification is bad, "Pride" holds a nuanced conversation about the ways that an influx of wealth can dismantle a neighborhood and help it at the same time, as seen through the eyes of a girl who must navigate that change. "My neighborhood is made of love," Zuri notes. "But it's money and buildings and food and jobs that keep it alive - and even I have to admit that the new people moving in, with their extra money and dreams, can sometimes make things better." What she wants is to "figure out a way to make both sides of Bushwick work." It is that story - the story of an ambitious girl struggling to cherish her home, even in the face of change - that gives "Pride" its spark and its heart. RATHER THAN REVISITING a classic tale of love, THE BONELESS MERCIES (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 352 pp., $18.99; ages 12 and up), by April Genevieve Tticholke, goes the opposite route: It explores death, war and glory by adapting "Beowulf." The book follows a group of young girls, the titular Boneless Mercies, who are trained killers, traveling across Vorseland, putting the old and sick out of their misery. But one of the Mercies, Frey, wants more than the death trade has to offer. She wants to kill not for money but for glory: "I would try my hand at greatness, and see where it led. Glory. I wanted to touch it. Taste it." With glory in mind, the Boneless Mercies set out to kill the dreaded Blue Vee beast, a giant terrorizing the land. It's a promising take on the oft-adapted epic poem. Unfortunately, "The Boneless Mercies" becomes overwhelmed by the task of expanding "Beowulf" into a new, distinct fantasy world. The meandering plot is encumbered by details that offer little payoff and a few characters who are clichéd and flat, even when we do dive into their back stories. As a result the novel can at times seem as unrewarding as the fate our heroes hope to escape. These stumbles are a shame because they obscure the empowering tale at the heart of the novel, starting with its deeply feminist update to its source material. Our heroes are women, and their antagonists are women, too. They are, at times, brutal and ruthless and violent in ways that cast in stark relief the reductive portrayal of women in so many of the stories that populate our canon. And Tticholke's characters are all searching, in their own way, for justice and equality. "The hearts of Boneless Mercies beat just as strongly as any Vorse warriors," the book declares. In moments like that, "The Boneless Mercies" feels like a cathartic war cry advocating for the power of girls and women. Hiding in the book are also several thoughtful and refreshing themes about the genre of the epic itself. For instance, toward the end, "The Boneless Mercies" flips the very idea of glory that its heroes seek. "I gave you a purpose, a quest, a chance to be noticed by the gods. I gave you this. Never forget," the fearsome Blue Vee beast proclaims in the book's final act. Frey responds, "I am in your debt, and I won't forget." It's both an engaging moment of camaraderie between two foes and a dynamic critique of the hero's journey: Who is granted honor and glory, and at what cost does it come? ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE COMBINES several tales - "The Wild Swans," "The Ugly Duckling" and "Snow White and RoseRed" - and transforms them into the enchanting BLANCA & ROJA (Feiwel & Friends, 371 pp., $17.99; ages 13 and up). The book follows the plight of the del Cisne sisters, Blanca and Roja, who are doomed to a family curse: Each generation of del Cisnes will have two daughters, but they will eventually be separated when one is turned into a swan. Which daughter will it be? The swans decide. When Blanca learns the secret to saving herself from turning into a swan, she resolves to use that advice to save her sister instead. Seeing Blanca's sudden determination in the swans' game, Roja believes she has been abandoned and resolves to thwart her sister and stay human herself. Intertwined with the tale of the del Cisne sisters are the journeys of Page and Yearling, both outcasts - Page, who feels constrained by gender roles ("Him and her, I kinda like getting called both. It's like all of me gets seen then. Doesn't usually happen, though. Most people can't get their head around boy and she at the same time, I guess"), and Yearling, who faces tremendous physical abuse at the hands of his cousin. The two flee into the forest, each for separate reasons, looking for escape. But rather than offering solace, the forest wraps them into Blanca and Roja's quest. To survive, all four will have to find one another, and find themselves. Though it's full of enchantments, what mostly makes "Blanca & Roja" magical is not the spells that animate the plot but the bond of sisterhood that brings to life Blanca and Roja's struggle. This is more than a story about girls who are threatened with being turned into swans - it is about unwavering loyalty to family, and the hurt that comes when that bond seems betrayed. But what elevates "Blanca & Roja" from a good adaptation to a brilliant one is not just how the book reinvents its source material - it's the ideas that McLemore layers on top of it: her own exploration of sisterhood, identity, the yearning to be seen that we all feel and the question of how we protect the things we love most. "The story of the ugly duckling was never about the cygnet discovering he is lovely," McLemore writes. "It is not a story about realizing you have become beautiful. It is about the sudden understanding that you are something other than what you thought you were, and that what you are is more beautiful than what you once thought you had to be." All these elements combine to make a story so complex and original, you'll forget "Blanca & Roja" is not a classic tale in its own right. MJ FRANKLIN is a social editor at The Times and a former editor at Mashable.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sisters Blanca and Roja del Cisne have grown up understanding their family's curse. Long ago, their ancestor bargained with the swans for a daughter. Every generation, the Del Cisnes have two daughters, but eventually, the swans always take one back. Roja, fierce and willful, has always believed she'd be the sister turned into a swan, while graceful, compliant Blanca would remain a girl. But if there's anything Blanca is willing to fight for, it's her sister. As their days together wane, two boys with curses of their own enter their lives. Barclay Holt, once the son of a wealthy, treacherous family, who has been trapped for a year in the body of a bear; and his best friend, Page Ashby, child of apple farmers, who identifies as a boy but finds that the pronouns she and her fit comfortably as well. As the four come closer together, their fates may become unalterably linked. In her fourth novel, McLemore (Wild Beauty , 2017) is at her finest; she twines Latino folklore through the fairy tales of Swan Lake and Snow White & Rose Red to create a story that is wholly original. She writes openheartedly about families found and families given, the weight of expectation and the price of duty, and in the end offers up something that's vibrant, wondrously strange, and filled to the brim with love of all kinds.--Maggie Reagan Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McLemore (Wild Beauty) offers another lushly written fairy tale retelling, this time intermingling hints of "Snow White" with "Swan Lake" and other classic tales of girls turned into swans. Devoted sisters Blanca and Roja are as different physically as siblings can be. Roja has hair as dark as "coffee grounds, but red... a red so dark it looked wet" and skin "as brown as the almond's skin"; Blanca's skin is pale, her hair "as fine and blond as a duckling's down." They grow up under a curse: in each generation of sisters, swans take one sister during the bloom of adolescence to become a swan for life. Rather than turn the sisters into rivals, McLemore tells a love story between siblings reticent to betray the other, both equally determined to outsmart the curse and the eager swans along with it. Two additional protagonists populate the novel: Barclay, a blue-eyed boy who becomes a bear by a different name and falls for Roja, and Page, a gender-non- binary teen who turns into a cygnet and grows captivated with Blanca. The four protagonists' family drama and secrets help to compel the narrative forward in this twisty, allusive story. Ages 13-up. Agent: Taylor Martindale Kean, Full Circle Literary. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Magical realism extraordinaire McLemore crafts a queer, Latinx mash-up of "Snow White," "Wild Swans," and Swan Lake told from four perspectives. Blanca and Roja del Cisne are sisters, destined to be ripped apart by a curse that will turn one of them into a swan. Enter a blue-eyed boy named Yearling, who can turn into a bear, along with his best friend Page, who is sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl, sometimes in-between. Real-world problems of small-town life, family betrayal, and developing crushes among the quartet are entangled with the very eminent danger of the curse of the swans. Reflective dialogue among and in the minds of each character results in meandering action. The expansive, magical tone of McLemore's writing leaves readers invested not just in the multidimensional characters' stories, but in their own unfolding paths and questions about identity. Colorism within the Latinx community and nonbinary gender representation are adeptly explored in McLemore's prose with nuance. The most magical element of this fairy tale is the focus on very real identities and how they intersect. The chapter endings of the four alternating perspectives sometimes abruptly tug readers from one thread to another. Any fan of McLemore's body of work, Bone Gap by Laura Ruby, or Malinda Lo's fantasy will revel in this novel. VERDICT A magical and lovely first purchase for all YA shelves.-Angela -Wiley, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Blanca and Roja, the del Cisne sisters, have grown up knowing their family is cursed as a result of a bargain made generations ago, and that eventually either Blanca or Roja will be trapped in the body of a swan and live among them. Blanca, fair-haired and sweet, and Roja, flame-haired and difficult, spend their lives trying to become more like each other so that they will be intertwined and ultimately impossible to separate when the swans finally arrive to claim their due. When a bear who is also a boy called Yearling arrives on their doorstep, followed by his friend Page (who uses both he and she pronouns), their story becomes more complicated and their fates much less clear. This tale reimagines Snow White and Rose Red as young Latinx women, and it mixes their stories with details and themes from The Ugly Duckling, Swan Lake, and The Wild Swans. Depth of character is sometimes sacrificed in order to incorporate so many threads (e.g., Yearlings story of dealing with family corruption is less well drawn than other narrative elements). But McLemores vivid descriptions create a tale rich with visual detail, and readers will be compelled to keep reading to find out the fate of these sisters. christina l. dobbs (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sisters Blanca and Roja attempt to escape their family curse in this mashup of "Snow-White and Rose-Red" and Swan Lake.As long as anyone in the Latinx del Cisne ("of the swans") family can remember, there have always been two daughters: One is destined to be transformed into a swan shortly after the younger sister's 15th birthday, while the other is left behind to live as a human. Fiery, darker-skinned, redheaded 15-year-old Roja has always believed she's the one the swans will claim, while kind, fair-skinned, golden-haired, 17-year-old Blanca has always promised Roja they would do everything to fight the curse. Despite being considered opposites, the sisters share a seemingly unbreakable bond that's tested when two missing local high school boys reappear in the woods near their home as a cygnet and a bear. White best friends Yearling, a boy from a rich but toxic family, and Page, a trans boy whose family are apple farmers, hide in the del Cisne home after returning to their human bodies. As love blossoms between the sisters and the best friends, they attempt to avoid a heartbreaking destiny. As with her other stories, McLemore (Wild Beauty, 2017, etc.) weaves in powerful themes of identity, family, and first love, but there are also much-needed messages about overcoming hurtful stereotypes and expectations.McLemore's poignant retelling is a must-read for fans of fantasy and fairy tales. (author's note) (Fantasy. 13-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
