Fantastic Fairytales - Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast has been my favourite fairy tale for as long as I can remember, other than a brief interlude with Goldilocks and the three bears when I was little. There is just something about the idea of getting to know someone for who they really are and not relying on the superficial.  I think it struck a real cord with me when I was working at a university library in my early 20's and one of our students looked really fierce and unapproachable - he had tribal scars all over his face.  When I got to know him, I discovered that he was the gentlest, sweetest person you could ever hope to meet. It taught me a very valuable lesson about not always assuming the worst and giving people a second chance.  Beauty and the Beast is at its heart a story about second chances.

So I am thrilled and delighted to have discovered two new retellings of Beauty and the Beast.  I am really looking forward to reading both of these.  If you've already had a chance, let me know what you thought.

 

Published: July 23rd, 2013

In the beginning was the darkness, and in the darkness was a girl, and in the girl was a secret...

In the domed city of Yuan, the blind Princess Isra, a Smooth Skin, is raised to be a human sacrifice whose death will ensure her city’s vitality. In the desert outside Yuan, Gem, a mutant beast, fights to save his people, the Monstrous, from starvation. Neither dreams that together, they could return balance to both their worlds.

Isra wants to help the city’s Banished people, second-class citizens despised for possessing Monstrous traits. But after she enlists the aid of her prisoner, Gem, who has been captured while trying to steal Yuan’s enchanted roses, she begins to care for him, and to question everything she has been brought up to believe.

As secrets are revealed and Isra’s sight, which vanished during her childhood, returned, Isra will have to choose between duty to her people and the beast she has come to love.

 

Publication: January 28th, 2014

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

Betrayed by her family yet bound to obey, Nyx rails against her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, she abandons everything she’s ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, disarm him, 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. But even if she could bring herself to love her sworn enemy, could she refuse her duty to kill him?

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.