Cruel Beauty
by Rosamund Hodge
Fairy-tale Retelling
342 pages
Published 2014
After reading Bright Smoke, Cold Fire I knew I HAD to find more Rosamund Hodge. She has a fantastic flair for taking fairy tales (or Shakespeare!) and twisting them into something darker but more realistic. Cruel Beauty is a twist on Beauty and the Beast, but this is no Stockholm Syndrome-suffering Beauty. She is resentful, and bitter, and angry at her father for subjecting her to this. She has trained her entire life to go to the Beast and destroy him, even if it means destroying herself too. What she find at the castle is nothing like what she expected, though, and neither is she what Hodge’s Beast expects. Watching these two bitter, mocking characters dance around each other to get to the bottom of the curse and what actually happened to their world is engrossing and beautiful.
I couldn’t put this book down once I started it, and I’ve already started Crimson Bound (Little Red Riding Hood), the next book in the same world. There’s also a novella, Gilded Ashes (Cinderella), that I should snag a copy of.
The world is lovely and evocative, with gods and Forest Lords and Demons who actively participate in the world and grant wishes and make deals. It’s a little bit Rumpelstiltskin, a little Fairy Godmother, a little Greek mythology, and all Rosamund Hodge. She’s got talent, and writes my favorite micro-genre SO WELL.
If you like dark fairy tales, read this and then everything else Rosamund Hodge has written. It’s excellent!
From the cover of Cruel Beauty:
The romance of Beauty and the Beast meets the adventure of Graceling in this dazzling fantasy novel about our deepest desires and their power to change our destiny.
Perfect for fans of bestselling An Ember in the Ashes and A Court of Thorns and Roses, this gorgeously written debut infuses the classic fairy tale with glittering magic, a feisty heroine, and a romance sure to take your breath away.
Betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom, Nyx has always known that her fate was to marry him, kill him, and free her people from his tyranny. But on her seventeenth birthday when she moves into his castle high on the kingdom’s mountaintop, nothing is what she expected—particularly her charming and beguiling new husband. Nyx knows she must save her homeland at all costs, yet she can’t resist the pull of her sworn enemy—who’s gotten in her way by stealing her heart.
Goddess In The Stacks 
Mmmmm Beauty and the Beast retellings are the best. I haven’t read this one yet, but I have it on the list!
ALL of Rosamund Hodge’s books are amazing. My review of Crimson Bound will be up Saturday! I love retellings in general – I just finished reading The Merry Spinster, which is a collection of short stories, and one of those is a Beauty and the Beast redo as well. It ends very differently though! (That review will be up next week.)
Ooooo I read The Merry Spinster a few months ago! It was such a weirder take (on most of the stories), but I loved the atmosphere!
Oh, it was definitely weird! I really enjoyed most of it, but there were a couple of stories that were very very odd. I recognize that he was playing with gender in some of the stories – the one where people could choose whether to be husbands or wives was really cool. The one where all the daughters used male pronouns was strange, though.