The biggest lie of all is the story you think you already know.The del Cisne girls have never just been sisters; they’re also rivals, Blanca as obedient and graceful as Roja is vicious and manipulative. They know that, because of a generations-old spell, their family is bound to a bevy of swans deep in the woods. They know that, one day, the swans will pull them into a dangerous game that will leave one of them a girl, and trap the other in the body of a swan.
But when two local boys become drawn into the game, the swans’ spell intertwines with the strange and unpredictable magic lacing the woods, and all four of their fates depend on facing truths that could either save or destroy them. Blanca & Roja is the captivating story of sisters, friendship, love, hatred, and the price we pay to protect our hearts.
If you know anything about me, you know Anna-Marie McLemore is one of my all time favourite authors. Her books have inspired me to do so many things, to think outside of my comfort zone, to look inside myself and reconcile with a lot of parts of me that I thought would never be healed and for that I will always be thankful. This book is up there with my new favourites ever. It touched on so many topics that were powerfully important to me and that demanded my full attention and comprehension and feelings. The reimagining of a classic tale in the voice of these two sisters who were highly complex and deep and multi-layered was well done and constructed. They were extremely flawed in their quest of learning how to survive and be their own persons and I saw my sister and myself in them a lot. This book impacted me in so many ways because it talked about raw and angered emotions that were trying to come out to the light and two main characters who were fighting and finding those emotions in every turn. The rivalry that were trusted upon these girls was the center of the plot but the thing that attracted me the most were the relationships that were formed and strengthened throughout the book.
I obviously adored how Anna-Marie McLemore wrote this book. With light-skinned and dark-skinned latinx sisters, with a transboy who uses he/she pronouns, with a boy who is trying to get over domestic abuse and trying to escape his family and his name. All those complexities were so beautifully explained and expanded. You could feel everyone's stories and were rooting for everyone's happiness. All their paths' cross with one another as they look for their salvation, for their meaning and their self-discovery. It's about two romantic love stories but it's mostly about the complicated love of these two sisters. No one writes like her. No one crafts like her.
Apart from all the technical and critical aspects of this book that touched me and made me feel that this book was objectively one of the best books of the year, I want to get sappy and tell you what it meant to me. I'm a sister. I have a complicated relationship with her but she's the most constant thing in my life and she's my best friend and has been my best friend since she was born. We're both latinas and have been compared to each other throughout our entire lives. This book felt like it put a lot of the feelings that we both shared into words. I know it's a book about rage and anger but it's also about those relationships that are unique and unbreakable when you live like we live. Like Blanca, I put my sister above everything and I protect her from the world and that doesn't mean she hasn't suffered but being the bigger sister I put myself in that role that I never left even now that we're both adults. It was so validating seeing that dynamic in these characters in how even though they were put against each other at so many points they still came together and fought for one another and that meant everything to me.
