This is a YA fantasy that has a premise designed for an elevator pitch: it's a modern portal fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, where the beauty in question is pulled from our reality and brought back to a vaguely European-based fantasy world and imprisoned by a prince who turns into a monster. But only her love can release him from his curse.
From the jump the book is clear on which various tropes the novel is intending to upend: Harper, the beauty, has cerebral palsy and was kidnapped while trying to rescue the stereotypically beautiful woman the prince's right hand man was trying to bring back to break the curse. This of course upends everything, and she begins to work to break the curse in a different way than assumed. There's a tension between her, the Prince Rhen, his guardsman Grey and the enchantress at the root of it all, and it's an interesting retelling, although not one that fully drew me into the world. That may in part have been because Harper had a complicated home life the likes of which is only ever found in this kind of YA novel, and until the very end of the book I didn't care about that subplot at all. It's a good first book to a series, though, and I liked the second one a lot.
Grade: B
From the jump the book is clear on which various tropes the novel is intending to upend: Harper, the beauty, has cerebral palsy and was kidnapped while trying to rescue the stereotypically beautiful woman the prince's right hand man was trying to bring back to break the curse. This of course upends everything, and she begins to work to break the curse in a different way than assumed. There's a tension between her, the Prince Rhen, his guardsman Grey and the enchantress at the root of it all, and it's an interesting retelling, although not one that fully drew me into the world. That may in part have been because Harper had a complicated home life the likes of which is only ever found in this kind of YA novel, and until the very end of the book I didn't care about that subplot at all. It's a good first book to a series, though, and I liked the second one a lot.
Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment