Cruel Beauty by
Rosamund Hodge
In the novel Cruel
Beauty we find a whole new “beauty’ and a very strange beast. The beast
is known to his people as the “gentle lord” who keeps them cut off from the
rest of the world via magic spell-one that seals the whole town in a different
dimension from the rest of the world. The current king made a deal with
the Gentle Lord-if his wife could conceive, he would give the child to the
Gentle Lord on her 17th birthday. The king ended up with
twin girls. The firstborn was set aside to be given away, while the
second was cherished. The first child, Nyx, is trained her whole life to
kill the Gentle Lord and set the kingdom free from his evil spell. The
book opens at the moment of truth-her 17th birthday.
There were a lot of
aspects to like in this book. The first was that it wasn’t set in
France. The second is that our “Belle” is a deeply flawed person.
She resents her family and her life, making her the opposite of the doe-eyed
optimist we usually see. The love triangle wasn’t my favorite, but I
LOVED that both guys were deeply flawed. They had opposite personalities,
but in the end neither was “better” than the other.
I stayed up way too
late reading this, and I would recommend it to any fairy tales fan.
