Yesterday I started reading Anna Marie McLemore’s magical realism book Wild Beauty and today I finished it.  The point of view oscillates between a girl named Estrella and a boy named Fel. The girl is one of a generation of five female cousins, all born from different mothers and all those mothers are born from separate grandmothers. The premise is that each woman has one child and that child has a special ability to miraculously grow a unique flower such as a dahlia, azalea, morning glory, or calla lily. Estrella can grow starflowers or borraja.

Why are there no men in the family? Well, once there were men, but they all disappeared because an ancient curse put on the women.

But this youngest generation of five girls are all in love with a girl, Bay Briar, who lives in another house and they all hide their love for fear that their mothers will disapprove.

All three generations of women live on La Pradera which is owned by the other girl’s rich family. They take care of the property and make all the flowers and plants thrive. None of the women can leave without suffering and dying unless they return.

One day, the girls decide to make a sacrifice so their combined love of Bay will not kill her. And Estrella finds the boy Fel who has no memory of who he is.

The book is a mystery about the origins of the cursed horticultural magic of the Nomeolvides women and the identity and past of Fel.

Now here there might be plot spoilers so if you don’t want to know the end, read no further.

I started reading this book to see if it would possibly work as a summer reading for maybe the tenth grade. I found the book boring and the prose a bit overwrought and the characters stereotypical. The political agenda of the book was quite plain in terms of supporting same-sex love and maybe even some gender-bending.

But it was not until I had quickly finished the book and thought a bit more about it that some of the other themes of the book surfaced. McLemore underscores how the brown Latino and Latinx people are oppressed and exploited by the rich whites. In her story of the miners who are often undocumented, underage immigrants, she shows how they are dehumanized and dismissed — their names left off the official list of miners so when the quarry collapses, their deaths are never known.

But what is also striking is Fel accuses the Nomeolvides women being complicit because they grow the flowers which cover over the fallen walls of the quarry and the graves of the buried men. They are complicit only because they don’t know the history of the quarry because that story is controlled by the wealthy white Briar family.

So I still find the shifting narrative point of view and the overly metaphoric use of diction annoying, but I also must applaud the author for weaving together these threads of contemporary social criticism in the guise of a fairy tale. Make room ye great practitioners of South American magical realism for Anna Maria McLemore who is continuing your tradition of using fiction as a weapon for justice and ethics.

Borraja or Borage