I wanted to like this book. I wanted to read it and love it and embrace in my arms like the beautiful, creative YA spin on the Beauty and the Beast tale it could have been. I wanted to be wowed by awesome narrative and marvel at this tale being so artfully twisted in a contemporary setting. I warned myself that the message might be a little loud considering the market, but I dived in with glee.

That lasted three pages.

I didn’t realize that the book would be so horrific that I would have to compare the failure to my hed is pastede on yay. Oh, because all the heads here and all the application of the Beauty and the Beast story were pastede on, guys. In fact, that might be a compliment. I’m not quite sure they were even pastede on yay. They were possibly just perched, the entire story sitting precariously atop a forced connection with Beauty and the Beast, ready to topple if the book was opened by someone with standards in literature higher than mediocre. Three chapters in I was somewhere between, “I’m so unimpressed!” and “Well, it can’t get much worse.”

I was wrong.

This book was lazy. I can take bad books as they come and let them go, but when I read about a title and get excited because I like retellings and finally get my hands on it and it flat out sucks balls? No thanks.

Why was this story so awful?

This book proclaims to be Beauty and the Beast from the Beast’s perspective. That sounds awesome, right? Enter Kyle Kingsbury, socialite asshole-in-training, who treats people like garbage and subsequently gets owned by a witch for making bad, bad choices and turned into a horrible, wretched Beast. Now, picture the story of Beauty and the Beast, add in a lonely girl with an abusive father and an obsessive teen-boy-turned-monster and a father who hates him, a witch that codes everything that’s happening to the reader, a few ridiculous sounding chats that only make the entire narrative seem even more ridiculous, a really bad attempt to be hip and cool and IN THE NOW, and there’s nothing new here. At all. Characters? One dimensional. Actual creativity involved in applying the Beast tale to this narrative? I suggest negatives, because the story was so tethered to the original tale that it suffered from embarrassing plot decision after embarrassing plot decision, such as the one that brings Kyle’s chance at redemption to him.

That moment in the book made me so mad. Oh, my god. It was like trying to fit an elephant through a mouse hole. I can suspend my disbelief, but this book asked me to take it and throw it off a fucking cliff to the jagged rocks below.

I boggled through the second half of the story, so utterly bemused why any author would make such choices that made the book weaker just to follow a formula. The entire book was phoned in from, damn, Mars. Maybe on Mars it sounded decent and not like a complete and utter train wreck that treats its readers like morons and plies on the pretentious literary ramblings to disguise characterizations so mortifying and a plot so disastrous it makes a 7.4 earthquake look like a Sunday picnic?

I can think of at least three ways this book would have been better; the whole time I read it I kept looking at various parts, like the awkward and embarrassing chats, or the moronic way Linda ends up in his life, or the whole total disregard for setting the retelling in a city that ends up being ignored and utilized in such small, insignificant ways. It seemed such a waste to set a retelling like this in a city and waste the city night life and possible seedy underground.

Also, if the dude was in a pond, how the hell was he on the internet.

To throw the story a bone: all the messages here are geared toward, well, nine year old kids, even though it has “teen issues”. Good moral lessons, really bad plot? It’s possible I could be too old for it, too old and cynical and demanding for the book to work for me. Other people might enjoy it besides the flaws in it that pulse like huge, gaping wounds. I am so disappointed in this title, the writing, the characterization and the forced formula plot. I can live with predictability; you sign up for it with most retellings, but damn, I wish I had spent my time just watching Disney’s Beauty and the Beast; at least then there’s Jerry Orbach to look forward to.

1. Reading Junky’s Reading Roost
2. Library & Literary Miscellany