The Graces by Laure Eve
My rating: 3/5 cats
i’m just realizing this about myself, but i am a person who tends to round two-star cat books up into three-star cat territory. my name is karen, and i’m an uprounder.
part of it is a readers’ advisory training that unconsciously steers me towards back-seating (NLGM) my personal reactions, part of it is residual catholic guilt, and part of it is just always wanting to like a book i have chosen to read – to identify at least one thing that made reading it not a waste of my time.
this book is a fast read, so it didn’t waste much of my time, and there’s at least one thing i liked about it, but let’s be perfectly clear, this is a very low three-star cat book.
i think it’s more enjoyable if you realize right from the get-go that the narrator is problematic a dick.
and that this book is Twilight with witches.
the Twilight comment isn’t just me being problematic a dick. i thought Twilight was a fine book, but i don’t need to read it again. and yeah, there are plenty of books in which an everyman is absorbed into a glamorous or mysterious family or lifestyle and is swept away by the romance of it all – Twilight didn’t invent that – and this one does differ from Twilight in that the protagonist goes in clear-eyed and calculating, knowing the family’s reputation and single-mindedly ingratiating herself into their lives because she covets their magic, but the setup is pretty similar: river moves to a new town with her mother after her father takes off (so, single-parented and barely monitored, like whazzername), and finds herself in a small town where one wealthy and powerful family – the graces – are the center of everyone’s admiration/fear/fascination, around whom rumors and lore about witchy powers swirl. and the parents are oh-so-elegant and cultured and mysterious and the children are so beautiful and sophisticated and charismatic: minor celebrities with mystery wrapped around them like fur stoles, an ethereal air to their presence that whispered tantalizingly of magic. the siblings are very close to each other and somewhat set apart from the “ordinary” kids because they are all “family first”
and of course our heroine, this self-proclaimed “not exceptionally pretty” girl goes and falls for super-handsome and casual-lothario fenrin grace, becoming besties with his sister summer, and barreling into the ranks of the grace family intent on smooching fenrin and becoming an honorary grace with all the magical powers that come with that role. for reasons.
but river isn’t an endearingly clumsy and likable character (plus, she names herself “river page,” which is as cheesy as it gets). the story is told entirely through her perspective, and her unreliable narrator status is twofold: a combination of her having limited information and her being deliberately misleading. for reasons. she spends a great deal of time emphasizing the importance of truth and honesty in the presence of the graces, with a pseudo-intellectual profundity that’s irritating to read (but is not inaccurate to the teenage bombast i recall from the wayback), while lying and hiding her motives and other seeecrets, frequently alluding to this suppression to the reader, if not to the graces:
– It was a compliment, of sorts. A testament to how good I was at hiding my true self.
–His face was open. It bothered him, but he didn’t try to hide it. That was brave. I hid everything I could.
it’s also emo as hell.
“…why do you enjoy being alone?”
…”I can stop pretending when I’m alone.”
apart from all that eyerollery stuff (and it is gratifying when another character calls her a “pretentious bitch”), she’s just … unpleasant, so you’re not really invested in seeing her succeed in her goals.
she’s jealous and petty – talking shit about other girls who are interested in fenrin simply because they want what she wants, and she’s an uneven mixture of timid; where she never says anything without planning and examining it in her head first, and delusionally confident that she’s the most special gal ever, deserving of holding fenrin’s interest:
Every girl with eyes loved Fenrin. But I was not like those prattling, chattering things with their careful head tosses and thick, cloying lip gloss. Inside, buried down deep where no one could see it, was the core of me, burning endlessly, coal black and coal bright…
No one had real details of their personal lives – except for whoever Fenrin was sleeping with in any given week, as he never hid it. He’d tour the girl around school for however long it lasted, one arm slung over her shoulders in a lazy fashion, and she would drip off him, giggling madly. They were nothing, just distractions. He was waiting for someone special, someone different who would catch his attention so suddenly and so completely, he’d wonder how he had survived all this time without them.
because none of the other girls he kisses for a week have ever thought they would be the one to tame him.
river spends so much time weighing what she’s going to say and how she’s going to present herself to win over the graces, but she’s inconsistent in what actually comes out, and when she’s not spouting oh-so-heavy things like: That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want to see the truth. It’s just that maybe we have to see it in stages to be able to understand it,” it looks more like this:
“I was kind of seeing him,” Summer said, as if we had been talking about it already. “Jase. He may be hot, but my god he’s dull. It’s a ‘smoke weed and surf a lot’ kind of life. I mean, there is literally nothing else that interests him. Plus, he’s bad in bed. He’s all loud groaning, like a crap zombie.”
I disliked these kinds of conversations. There wasn’t an obvious response. I didn’t know him, so I couldn’t exactly agree.
“Oh right,” I tried.
yeah, not super-impressive. there’s so much of that monosyllabic grunting from her, one wonders why the graces want anything to do with her.
more reasons to dislike her – she claims to not like bullies, after stepping up (in view of fenrin) to defend a girl from being picked on, but she does a fair bit of bullying herself, and she’s quick to judge people by reputation, especially people the graces have problems with. so – lame philosophy, manipulation of truth to get what she wants, using magic to punish other girls, obsessing over some dude who smells like “manly vanilla,” bald desire to be special and included, and although she denies it, using summer to get closer to fenrin and to get closer to magic of her own.
all dick moves.
not that one needs to relate to or like a book’s narrator, but you gotta like at least one of the characters, and they’re all kind of clichéd.
the only character i “liked” was summer, and only when her vulnerability came to the surface. i thought that dimension of her character was well-written, once her cookie-cutter ‘tough-as-nails goth chick’ stuff was dispensed with.
i think this book would have been stronger if there had been 20% less cullen grace infatuation weighing down the front half, and if the reveal had been shifted to the 3/4 mark, so there could have been a bit more time spent exploring (and defining) what it means. View Spoiler »
and the names: fenrin, thalia, summer, gwydion – ugh. there’s also a character named “wolf,” just to add another layer to the Twilight cake, even though he’s not a working-class werewolf or anything.
moral of the story – sometimes netgalley knows best.
many thanks to anmiryam for sending it to me, though!
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damn you, netgalley!!! why you so mean??
