✩✩✩/5 stars
Genres: young adult, fantasy
(TW: cancer, death of a loved one, abuse, ableist talk from a villain, suicidal thoughts, abduction and captivity.)
Page count: 496
Tropes: retelling, enemies to lovers (kinda)
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🧚 The Good:
At first I was sceptical about the beauty and the beast retelling, but I loved that aspect of this book!
Beauty and the Beast is one of my favourite movies, and it was so exciting to read a book that was a retelling of the movie. The author could not portray all the characters in the movie as the characters in the book, but the ones that made it into the book were showcased beautifully! The Beast was Rhen, Belle was Harper, the sorceress was Lilith, mrs. Potts was shown through Freya, and even-though it isn’t clear I think Grey had a personality like Cogsworth.
I loved how kind Harper was, but at times she was getting on my nerves because of how she was treating Rhen. Harper was a teenager who had cerebral palsy. She is high functioning and I can’t speak on the accuracy of this representation.
At first I thought Rhen was a creep who only talked about his curse, but there was a lot of development in his character, and I loved him for that.
I absolutely hated Lilith AKA the sorceress. In the movie the sorceress actually has a valid reason to curse the Beast, but Lilith cursed not only Rhen, but the entire kingdom of Emberfall because Rhen did not want to be in a relationship with her. She is twisted and abusive, so definitely hated her.
This book is a part of The Cursebreaker trilogy, so many aspects that I would have loved to see, were not covered in this book but it was a fast-paced and thrilling read!
I definitely recommend it if you love reading YA fantasy, and want to read a retelling!
❌ The Bad: It was little fast-paced, and I would have loved if the story was built up more. Sometimes the characters annoying me, and I understand that it was important, but I wanted to gouge their eyes out 😀
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My favorite quote:
“The choices we face may not be the choices we want, but they are choices nonetheless.”
― Brigid Kemmerer, A Curse So Dark and Lonely
Have you read/ would you want to read this book? Leave your thoughts in the comments 🙂
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