What makes a girl "beastly?" Is it having too much ambition? Being too proud? Taking up too much space? Or is it just wanting something, anything, too badly?
That's the problem Arabella faces when she makes her debut in society. Her parents want her to be sweet and compliant so she can marry well, but try as she might, Arabella can't extinguish the fire burning inside her -- the source of her deepest wishes, her wildest dreams.
When an attempt to suppress her emotions tragically backfires, a mysterious figure punishes Arabella with a curse, dooming her and everyone she cares about, trapping them in the castle.
As the years pass, Arabella abandons hope. The curse is her fault -- after all, there's nothing more "beastly" than a girl who expresses her anger -- and the only way to break it is to find a boy who loves her for her true self, a cruel task for a girl who's been told she's impossible to love.
When a handsome thief named Beau makes his way into the castle, the captive servants are thrilled, convinced he is the one to break the curse. But Beau -- spooked by the castle's strange and forbidding ladies-in-waiting, and by the malevolent presence that stalks its corridors at night -- only wants to escape. He learned long ago that love is only an illusion.
If Beau and Arabella have any hope of breaking the curse, they must learn to trust their wounded hearts, and realize that the cruelest prisons of all are the ones we build for ourselves.
Jennifer Donnelly has a beautiful style, and a remarkable imagination, recreating and fleshing out old fairy stories to turn them into modern retellings. (For a given value of 'modern'; this is not set in this century, that's for sure.) Her language is rich and gorgeous, immersing us in this fabulous world.
Which makes the little plot problems easier to overlook, but afterwards they come back. For instance, there's a century's worth of food stored under the castle, but Arabella's approaching the end of her curse, not the start. Did they initially have two hundred, or have they been replacing everything they used, even knowing they wouldn't need it? Up until the start of the story the bridge was intact; did none of the servants ever try to leave? And, as other reviewers have noted, Espidra and the others don't make a lot of sense, as a whole.
This makes it sound like I didn't enjoy the story, but I did, very much, and I'll be looking out for more by Jennifer. There are plenty more fairytales she could use, and the message buried here is one that we all need to hear as often as possible. Fantastic.
Beastly Beauty publishes on the 7th of May, 2024. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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