Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

4.17/5.00

Published: 2014
Genre: Retelling, YA

Goodreads

Let me tell you a story. There once were two sisters who made their brother watch Disney princess movies with them. Now, some Disney movies were interesting—Lady and the Tramp, The Lion King, but the princess ones bored him, with one exception. The Beauty and the Beast captured my attention. The characters felt more interesting, with Belle the bookworm and the bitter Beast. The plot felt a bit different from the rest of the Disney princess movies. 

Rosamund Hodge tells a gorgeous retelling of that tale.   

Plot? Check.

Setting? Could have been delved into more but still interesting.  

Characters? Great.

Writing? Not pretentious or purple.

The Gentle Lord and demons staring from the shadows rule Arcadia, with its parchment sky and Greek influences. Even though it never works, they bargain with the Gentle Lord, and always pay with their misery. When a man, desperate for children, makes a bargain, he loses his wife to death and one of his daughters to a marriage with the Gentle Lord. From birth, Nyx learns her role—to assassinate her husband.

Nyx is the type of character I love. Bitter and poisonous. Not overly judgmental and self-righteous. She’s aware of her flaws. She fights.

I’m a sucker for a love story, just not the romanticized fairy tales that I see in most stories, where everything turns out okay and everything gets better. Love somehow cures the depression or makes the cancer alright. Like The Beauty and the Beast, this is a story about love, but a little different from the usual romance.

Certain elements will strike the avid reader as familiar, like the romance, but they are wound together in such a way to still make it interesting.

Rosamund Hodge, T.S. Eliot lover, is a writer of YA fantasy. Her most recent work was Bright Smoke, Cold Fire, published in 2016 as part one of a duology inspired by Romeo and Juliet.