Book Review: Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

COMING SOON: JANUARY 28, 2014

Book Description:

Graceling meets Beauty and the Beast in this sweeping fantasy about one girl's journey to fulfill her destiny and the monster who gets in her way-by stealing her heart.

Based on the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Cruel Beauty is a dazzling love story about our deepest desires and their power to change our destiny.

Since birth, Nyx has been betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom-all because of a foolish bargain struck by her father. And since birth, she has been in training to kill him.

With no choice but to fulfill her duty, Nyx resents her family for never trying to save her and hates herself for wanting to escape her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, Nyx abandons everything she's ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, destroy his enchanted castle, and break the nine-hundred-year-old curse he put on her people.

But Ignifex is not at all what Nyx expected. The strangely charming lord beguiles her, and his castle-a shifting maze of magical rooms-enthralls her.

As Nyx searches for a way to free her homeland by uncovering Ignifex's secrets, she finds herself unwillingly drawn to him. Even if she could bring herself to love her sworn enemy, how can she refuse her duty to kill him? With time running out, Nyx must decide what is more important: the future of her kingdom, or the man she was never supposed to love.

My Thoughts

A standalone novel! YES, PLEASE! A beautiful, dark, retelling of Beauty & the Beast?! Double yes please!

 

Opening Sentence: I was raised to marry a monster.

 

WHOA... what a GREAT opening line! I was HOOKED! However this is not a typical young adult fantasy or paranormal romance. Nooooo, there is NOTHING light or fluffy about this story unlike the sweet Disney version we all know and love and watched as kids. Cruel Beauty is a different kind of story. It's dark, it's frightening, it's morbid, but the writing is simply beautiful.

 

Nyx was raised knowing she would marry the "Gentle Lord" in order to kill him and save their world from his evil ways. However she more of a sacrifice to atone for the sins of her father who struck a bargain with this "Gentle Lord" and Nyx has to pay the price.

 

At first it was a little slow and Nyx whined a lot. But this author never made her into the "pure hearted" heroine that saves a beast and then the kingdom by breaking some spell. Oooooh NO this is a twisted story mixed my mythology of gods and bargain makers that have all a twisted way of doing things that nobody comes out happy. I told you think is not a light a fluffy book. This is about evil and being trapped when you were trying to do the right thing. It's about a girl who always want to be pure hearted but failed everyday but didn't allow it to consume her. This is about a boy who struck a bargain to be pure and ended up damning himself and his entire kingdom with dark well hidden clues to figure out the whole story. Clues that could literally kill you. In a house with danger behind every door. And hopelessly no way to break it without destroying the whole land.

 

Without going too much into it. this story was amazing. I felt it had a bit of a Juliet Marillier feel to it. So if you like the twists unique ways of Marillier then you'll like this book. I completely enjoyed it, this has been a GREAT start to the new year with this AMAZING book!

 

Language: none

Violence: mild

Drugs/Alcohol: none

Sexual Content: moderate (PG-13, talk of characters sleeping together [not detailed] knowledge that characters have slept together {not detailed})

Meet the Author:

 



When my older brother was thirteen, he started a writing club with his friends and wouldn’t let me join because I was only eight. I promptly swore that I would become a writer and make him sorry.
He still isn’t sorry. (I checked.) But in 2014 I will publish my first novel with Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins, so I guess everything worked out okay.
Some other facts about me:
• I practice Shorinji Kempo, a Japanese martial art based on Shaolin Kung Fu.
• Cruel Beauty is my debut novel, but it is somewhere between the third and sixth that I ever completed, depending on how you count things. (There was the 40,000-word mess I called a novel when I was sixteen, and the 220,000-word mess I briefly pretended was a single novel in 2009.)
• NaNoWriMo changed my life and got me finishing novels again after a long hiatus. But Cruel Beauty is not a NaNoWriMo novel. (The NaNoWriMo project that changed everything was the 220,000-word mess. Someday I may even revise it.)
• I grew up as a homeschooler in Los Angeles, and I spent my childhood marinating in Greek mythology, which is where all the Greek elements in Cruel Beauty come from.
• Then I got a B.A. in English at the University of Dallas, and an M.St. in Medieval English at Oxford. Naturally, I moved to Seattle and got a job with computers.
• I have studied five languages (Spanish, French, Latin, Old Norse, and Japanese), though sadly I am still not able to speak any of them.
• I love some things more than T. S. Eliot’s poetry. But not many things.
• I am represented by Hannah Bowman of Liza Dawson Associates.