Book: The Everlasting Rose
Author: Dhonielle Clayton
Series: The Belles #2
In this sequel to the instant New York Times bestseller, Camille, her sister Edel, and her guard and new love Remy must race against time to find Princess Charlotte. Sophia's Imperial forces will stop at nothing to keep the rebels from returning Charlotte to the castle and her rightful place as queen. With the help of an underground resistance movement called The Iron Ladies-a society that rejects beauty treatments entirely-and the backing of alternative newspaper The Spider's Web, Camille uses her powers, her connections and her cunning to outwit her greatest nemesis, Sophia, and restore peace to Orleans.
The first book definitely set up a wonderful problem with its extremely troublesome social mindset regarding the notions of beauty. I will admit, I wasn't really sure what to expect in regards to what direction this book would go, so I walked in as openminded as anyone could be with hopes to be genuinely surprised.
I'm not too sure what to make of it. On one hand, I was hoping for some kind of epic showdown or confrontation, but on the other hand, I wasn't sure there would be enough time to develop Camille's character properly without it feeling rushed and then ruining the book. I got neither, with some good aspects and some bad.
The good was that Camille's character stayed consistent throughout the entirety of the book. She developed a feminist perspective of her role as a Belle, though not quite as strong as I had hoped. Her sister, Edel, was an absolute delight to read about; she was smart and sassy, headstrong and blunt, not afraid to distrust everyone or to defy playing nice.
This book definitely examined some of the further problems on a wider scale of beauty as the sole value (and thereby commodity) of life. However, it didn't quite propose much in terms of a solution to this problem, so the overall plot resolution was a bit weak in my opinion. Then again, the issue of beauty even today is extremely difficult to tackle, and trying to figure out a plausible solution is near impossible.
The ending itself was also a bit anticlimactic; similar to the first book, things went from really bad to fine all within a span of pages. The difference being that this was the final book, so there isn't any followups to be done. As a result of this being the final book, I feel like the series came to a rather abrupt halt, with a lot more of the social aspects that could have been explored. There are still quite a few loose ends, which does slightly irritate me, but I did read somewhere that there might be more books in the future. If so, I'd definitely be interested in reading a bit more to find out exactly what goes on in this revolutionized world!
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