In Wild Beauty, acclaimed YA author Anna-Marie McLemore introduces a spellbinding setting and two characters who are drawn together by fate—and pulled apart by reality.
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.
Anna-Marie McLemore's debut novel The Weight of Feathers garnered fabulous reviews and was a finalist for the prestigious YALSA Morris Award, and her second novel, When the Moon was Ours, was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Praise for Wild Beauty:
“No one does magical realism quite like McLemore, and this third novel, laced with slow-burning suspense, folklore, romance, and spun together with exquisite, luxuriant prose, proves it. . . . Sheer magic: fierce, bright, and blazing with possibility.” —Booklist, starred review
"A solid, must-have addition to McLemore’s growing body of work, this fantastical tale will delight her fans and entice a new audience." —School Library Journal, starred review
1125191632
Wild Beauty: A Novel
In Wild Beauty, acclaimed YA author Anna-Marie McLemore introduces a spellbinding setting and two characters who are drawn together by fate—and pulled apart by reality.
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.
Anna-Marie McLemore's debut novel The Weight of Feathers garnered fabulous reviews and was a finalist for the prestigious YALSA Morris Award, and her second novel, When the Moon was Ours, was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Praise for Wild Beauty:
“No one does magical realism quite like McLemore, and this third novel, laced with slow-burning suspense, folklore, romance, and spun together with exquisite, luxuriant prose, proves it. . . . Sheer magic: fierce, bright, and blazing with possibility.” —Booklist, starred review
"A solid, must-have addition to McLemore’s growing body of work, this fantastical tale will delight her fans and entice a new audience." —School Library Journal, starred review
In Wild Beauty, acclaimed YA author Anna-Marie McLemore introduces a spellbinding setting and two characters who are drawn together by fate—and pulled apart by reality.
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.
Anna-Marie McLemore's debut novel The Weight of Feathers garnered fabulous reviews and was a finalist for the prestigious YALSA Morris Award, and her second novel, When the Moon was Ours, was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.
Praise for Wild Beauty:
“No one does magical realism quite like McLemore, and this third novel, laced with slow-burning suspense, folklore, romance, and spun together with exquisite, luxuriant prose, proves it. . . . Sheer magic: fierce, bright, and blazing with possibility.” —Booklist, starred review
"A solid, must-have addition to McLemore’s growing body of work, this fantastical tale will delight her fans and entice a new audience." —School Library Journal, starred review
Anna-Marie McLemore was born in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and grew up in a Mexican-American family. She attended University of Southern California on a Trustee Scholarship. A Lambda Literary Fellow, she has had work featured by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, CRATE Literary Magazine’s cratelit, Camera Obscura’s Bridge the Gap Series, and The Portland Review. She is the author of The Weight of Feathers, which was a Morris Award finalist, and When the Moon was Ours, a 2017 Stonewall Honor book.
Want to read a fantasy from a culture steeped in magical tradition? Then stories by Latinx authors may be the right fit for you. Latinx cultures bear the roots of magical realism, and stories from Latinx cultures often celebrate a hybrid of the magical and the realistic. When Latinx authors delve into fantasy, they often […]
More than fifty years after its publication, One Hundred Years of Solitude is finally coming to a screen near you. Netflix announced earlier this month it will produce a Spanish-language adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s landmark novel, a cornerstone of magical realism and Latin American literature. In honor of this momentous occasion, we’ve handpicked some […]
Today on the blog, we welcome back the amazing Heidi Heilig—author of the acclaimed The Girl From Everywhere—who returns with her sophomore series, For a Muse of Fire. The book is about Southeast Asian–inspired shadow puppets, necromancy, colonialism, and rebellion and is just as complex and delicious as that sounds. Heilig has been very outspoken […]
Pride Month is a great time to put the focus on queer YA—specifically, some of the incredible intersectional queer books YA has been blessed with, given to us by indigenous authors and authors of color. We’ve got a stack you can read now, and another half dozen you can preorder!
Talking about anthologies is forever one of my favorite things, because—especially as their shelf presence grows and you start to see repeat authors—you get to learn which of your favorite novelists have a serious gift for short fiction, too. There are a lot of familiar voices in this season’s anthologies, but what would these collections […]