A review by angelinebadams
Damned Pretty Things by Holly Wade Matter
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Damned Pretty Things is a book about the stories and relationships, that we’re running towards or away from. And it’s about how sometimes we run away so thoroughly that even the memory of our past life is just mist in the rear-view mirror.
Fortune is an itinerant musician who’s been on the road for a year (that she knows of), braiding trinkets into her hair like a more tangible diary of where she’s been, which she needs, because she’s got amnesia. One thing Fortune knows (or thinks she knows) is that she made a deal with the Devil. He took the lines on her palms, and he left her with a car, and a wicked talent for playing the guitar. So she goes from town to town, singing her way across America to make her living, seducing those she meets with her story – until blown tires and the strange pull of the mountain town of Sky bring her into contact with a man named Lightning…
Maud is an eighteen-year-old cafe waitress from a big, colourful family, struggling to be seen as more than a kid, and harbouring (though she doesn’t know it yet) a powerful hereditary gift for witchcraft. A natural songbird, former shy girl and current firebrand, Maud’s in that phase of life where your dreams are bigger than your knowhow. Between the influence of her city-dwelling aunt and her local cinema’s sophisticated playbill, Maud knows there’s a big world out there, but for now she’s stuck with her resentment of prep cook Low, and her unrequited crush on a man named Lightning… yep, that Lightning.
But a smalltown girl who’s the wallflower of her own story can be the villain of someone else’s, and Fortune knows something about Maud’s history that Maud herself has forgotten. Discovering that their voices and musical repertoires complement each other, the pair form Damned Pretty Things, and embark on a road trip to find Fortune’s past and Maud’s future. What emerges will test their relationships with the people they love and hate, and particularly with each other.
One of the many joys of this book is the way it folds back on itself to reveal unreliable narration, withheld secrets and narrative lacunae, letting us get to know characters with fresh eyes, and see perspectives we were inveigled to ignore because we got so caught up in one person’s point of view. It also, without being overtly political, has a lot to say about being a young woman - and more subtly but insistently in Fortune’s case, a young Black woman - in a world where stories insist on casting them as the ingenue, the bad influence, the foundling or the femme fatale. We’re all more, this book says, than the stories people tell about us, or even the stories we tell about ourselves.
The handling of magic intrigues, particularly its somatic effects: what if your own spell could be so strong it made you sick? What if something hurt you so much that you forgot it? What if magic were so everyday that your mother doled it out to the neighbours in exchange for home-made cakes, but so powerful that it could draw people like a magnet to a place that has a way of working things out? Find out. Open the book, visit Sky, settle down in Robin’s cafe, and hear a tale told - or sung. You’ll come for the mountain views, but stay for the people. The only thing missing is a Damned Pretty Things soundtrack - this is definitely one of those times when a fictional band is so good, you’ll want to hear them for real.