The Beautiful Ones is a fantasy of manners set in a world inspired by Belle Epoque France. It follows Hector, a stage magician with telekinetic powers, who returns to the capital after a decade of travelling abroad hoping to connect with his lost lover Valérie. Unfortunately, Valérie is married to one of the richest men in the city and invested in maintaining her social status and wealth. In an attempt to get her attention Hector courts Valérie’s step-sister Nina who has recently moved to the city and is ignorant to the social politics of society.

The Beautiful Ones is a character-centric novel and we closely follow the messy interpersonal drama of our three protagonists. This made the first half of the book a punishment to read. The callous disregard of others by Valérie and Hector took centre stage and these two were insufferable because of it. Their cruel manipulation of Nina made them painful point-of-view characters. Nina's intense naiveté also added to my frustrations with the first half of this book.

While this may sound damning Silvia Moreno-Garcia managed to make all that suffering worthwhile. The Beautiful Ones is a novel that comes together brilliantly in its second half. The flaws of our protagonists in the first half are essential because of the transformative growth they go through. Moreno-Garcia makes the reader work for it but the changes we see in the majority of the cast are earned and that deft character work was the backbone of this story.

The central romance between Hector and Nina is tied to their growth. They work well as a couple because Silvia Moreno-Garcia interrogates these two thoroughly. She explores how the mistakes they made in the first half of the novel impacted Nina and Hector. Hector's remorse at his cruel manipulation was genuine and the consequences and growth as a result of that are unpacked completely. Nina matures into an astute young woman less concerned with the opinions of others yet more cognizant of the social politics around her. Her blossoming into a strong relentless character was brilliant. These two grow into people that compliment each other perfectly. The relationship that flowered was built on healthy foundations and was toe-curlingly sweet to boot.

Despite this, The Beautiful Ones wasn’t perfect. Its major downfall was its depiction of Valérie. Unlike Nina and Hector Valérie isn't allowed to grow. She's transformed into a caricature of herself and the crazed villain of the story. Moreno-Garcia twists a woman who had room to be layered into a cliché “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and her reproduction of said trope felt derogatory and cheap. What stung, even more, was that this shallow characterization was applied to a woman whose autonomy was ripped away. Her downfall didn't feel like justice it felt like a tragic reproduction of misogynistic tropes.

Another, milder, frustration I had with this story was the lack of magic throughout. You could excise every reference to magic from this story with little impact on the plot. While Moreno-Garcia included a handful of delightful scenes demonstrating Hector and Nina’s magical gifts—telekinetic magicians are an inherently cool concept—it was too few and far between for my liking.

While the missed opportunities in The Beautiful Ones were disappointing this book was a genuinely delightful read. This standalone is one of my favourite fantasies of manners and solidified Silvia Moreno-Garcia as an author I can always trust to produce a good story.