It should be covered in rose petals, so it might shed a rose petal everywhere it’s been just so everyone might know it’s been there. Wild Beauty is an iridescently beautiful book. Even when it held love, that love came sharp, and she didn’t know how to offer it to anyone except with the edges out.” I really can't put into words how much own-voices stories like these matter for marginalized readers. As a queer person of color from a country that fell under imperialism and is still affected by it, reading this book felt like a hand reached for and found in the dark. This is a story that both broke my heart and held it tenderly inside me. It's about intentions that are rooted in good but that often grow thorns in the end, and love stories that always come with the price of loss. It's about brown-skinned men who are driven out of their lands by men who duct-taped down six shelves of their sweat and hard-work, and shatterproof legacies that consist of pinning flowers to the earth in an unwitting attempt to conceal the decaying ruins under.

Wild Beauty is an own-voices novel about queer women of color who love their lovers out of existence and grow flowers that never keep to where their hands put them, and soft boys who appear from nothingness to relearn the letters of their names in an alphabet that's constantly changing.

It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places. “Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape.

Wild beauty anna marie mclemore