My daughter began reading and reviewing books for YALSA's Teens' Top 10 program two years ago. She had some good success finding great books through the program, like Warbringer, a Top 10 pick her first year.
This time she read The Book of Pearl, by Timothee de Fombelle, and promptly fell in love with the love story! This is not a simple tale. In fact, it's quite sophisticated, with multiple POV changes and there's a reliance on prior knowledge -- what it feels like to have a broken, crushed heart -- that many YA readers may / not recognize. I almost think it should, for that reason, be an adult book instead of YA.
It begins from a point of view of a 14-year-old boy the MC, Joshua Ilian, saves from drowning in his sorrows when his heart is crushed by his first love. This is the part that could be confusing, but as an adult and writer, I admired the storytelling technique that revealed, over the course of the book, Olia and Joshua Ilian's generations-long romance through the lens of this boy-turned-man.
Ilian is a prince in his own realm, the Faerie world, son of a king who's lost his mind after his wife dies in childbirth. Ilian is mistaken to be a girl and he's all-but tossed aside by the King and his older brother, Ian, who takes the throne upon his father's descent into madness. For many years, Ian is content to let Ilian grow up in the house where their mother died, on a spring-fed lake.
Eventually the rage and hatred Ian feels for the sister he believes killed his mother prompts him to send his archers and court sorcerer, Taag, to kill her. The archers, thinking they're looking for a girl, instead catch the spring fairy Olia, who was responsible for the Queen's death by drying up the lake, and has been trying to make up for her mistake by being close to Ilian ever since. They've come to love each other and a single kiss from him strips her of her shape-shifting fairy powers forever, condemning her to a human form that does not age.
But Taag can't bring himself to kill Ilian outright -- instead he sends him to a world without stories, our world, and hides his inert body in a cave. Olia begs to go with him and Taag grants her this wish, but at a steep price -- Ilian must never see her, or she will vanish in a poof, never to have existed at all.
Ilian arrives in our world on the eve of WWII in France, in the pouring rain, outside the Pearl family's marshmallow shop. The Pearls lost their only son some years before and quiver with excitement to welcome this young man into their home with open hearts. When the gendarmes threaten to conscript Jacques Pearl, accusing him of hiding his only son from service, Ilian takes the dead boy's name, Joshua, and his Jewish identity and serves in his stead.
He is captured and sent to a German concentration camp, where he comes upon a Polish bully who possesses a mermaid's scale, a remnant, a token of his fairy world. Joshua's plan to get it fails, but he escapes the concentration camp and joins a maquis cell. After fighting off the Germans, one day he receives a package -- the slingshot from his childhood, which he last saw on Olia's wrist, and a note: "They must have tokens of proof."
From that point forward, Joshua Ilian Pearl works to accumulate as many tokens from his world as he can to break the spell that separates him from Olia and his world, until his brother sends archers after him once again, and he flees to the French countryside.
All the while Olia watches from a distance, her heart soaring with Ilian's triumphs and plummeting with his failures, terrified he will inadvertently catch a glimpse of her.
I won't spoil how it ends, or how the spell is broken, just know my teen cried her eyes hinchados (swollen shut), as did I.
A sophisticated tale of a truly touching love story!
