I’ll read any Beauty and The Beast themed book; y’all know that. And this one had promise- Bella is the daughter of a archeologist-adventurer, and Miles is a duke that’s turned his back on the world because ~reasons~ and spends all his time and energy with his house full of precious Egyptian artifacts. With the help of a fairy godmother of sorts and some magic shoes, will Bella melt his heart?
I have not read any of the other books in Drake’s Cinderella Sisterhood series, but the Fairy Godmother and magic shoes are the tie-in device, and it’s cute.
Bella Jones and her twin younger siblings have just arrived in England after the death of their father. They’ve all grown up in various places in Persia, and when we first meet Bella, she’s job hunting in her Persian clothing- which is so silly I had a hard time taking her seriously after that. Shockingly, everyone thinks she’s a dirty foreigner (not helped when she pulls a knife on a particularly nasty asshole), and won’t hire her.
Her father left her with a deathbed instruction: find Aylwin, and there’s a map to a pharaoh’s treasure, so if she does, she gets half. It takes a while before she finds out that Aylwin is the Duke of Aylwin, and a mysterious visitor engineers things to get Aylwin to hire her as a curator for his house full of stuff.
Miles has basically recused himself from society since he inherited the title at 13, when his father was murdered by grave robbers on the same expedition that Bella’s father was on. He only wants to be left alone with all of the totally legally acquired (there are bills of sale from the Egyptian government and everything!) artifacts he has, including but not limited to mummies.
Yes, the man keeps mummies in one of his drawing rooms. That’s just… rude.
Anyway, he’s beastly in just that he doesn’t want to deal with people. He does go to a local brothel once a week to tend to his needs (which is an interesting choice for a hero these days), but he realizes his Magic Wang has a thing for Bella when his partner of the week says that he called out Bella when he reached his crisis. (And then covers it by saying “That’s just Italian for beautiful! I was totttttttally saying that you were beautiful.”)
Things are complicated by the fact that neither one of them will say the real reasons they agreed to this arrangement: she doesn’t tell him about the map, and he doesn’t mention that he thinks her father killed his father, so they’ve got some communication issues. Miles also has a supremely dickish heir presumptive who has an equally dickish wife who do NOT want any little jumped bit of fluff getting ideas about taking HER duchess’s coronet. There are other spoilery complications too.
The problem is, I never really…cared? Miles turns real quick from “I WILL NEVER MARRY YOU GET OUT OF MY LIIIIFE” to “Let’s bang” to “I love you and want to marry you!” with no real tracking on why those changes happen. Bella pretty much falls for him because the plot demanded it.
The map, of course, is an ancient papyrus that shows the location of Tutankhamen’s tomb, which of course no one is going to find for another 100 years, so naturally it needs to be destroyed.
It’s interesting how Drake tried to deal with the colonialist looting of artifacts: she mentions bills of sale from the Egyptian government a coupe of times, implying that Miles and his father rightfully paid for the items, and didn’t just wander off with them because that’s what British explorers did. I get it- who wants their hero to be a looter? And I appreciate it, but it’s still like, not quite accurate. It’s an interesting tension between being true to the historical flavor of the characters, and viewing them through the lenses we have now. I’m not sure what the right balance is, and I’m not sure this is it. It’s a little bit better than the mostly ahistorical “we’re just here for the culture” attempts in Lady Emily’s Exotic Journey.
As far as Miles’ beastly-ness goes…. he’s just asocial, not beastly. You need your beast to be a right asshole, not just, “ugh people are exhausting and annoying.” People ARE exhausting and annoying. He needed to be just MORE.
I was kind of disappointed by this book. It was okay, and I always appreciate a heroine that is outside the box, but… it was mostly just kinda there. This was a book I read. I didn’t regret the time I spent reading it, but it’s not something I’ll be thinking about now that I’m done with it.
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If you’ll read any Beauty and the Beast book, you might want to check out Beast by Ella James. It’s an (as required by law these days) erotic modern day spin on the fairytale about a movie star who winds up in one of the most violent prisons, and years later the heroine’s stepfather is the warden at the prison. I’ve only read the free preview, which wasn’t bad, but you do have to be into extremely aggressive Alpha heroes to enjoy anything Ella James writes… she also cautions it to be “dark and boundary pushing” so caveat emptor and etc. What I, however, would warn any potential readers about is there is a moment in Red and Wolfe (the Red Riding Hood retelling she did) where the hero, during some hot sex, says in a completely straightfaced manner that is meant to indicate it is extremely sexy, “I want to get a taste of this fine ham” while slapping the heroine’s butt, and I just about lost it, so who knows what sort of blisteringly hot sex talk is in her other books? Maybe charcuterie. But, yeah, if you’re looking for your Beast to be Beastly, it might be worth checking out cautiously.
One minor point – keeping mummies around the house wouldn’t have been all that unusual at that time. Some people would have mummy unwrapping parties – everyone would gather around and watch as the mummy was unwrapped and ooh and aah over the amulets and jewels (if any) that were tucked in with the wrappings.
Also, mummies would be sold and ground up to use in “medicines” (ick) and, rarely, in paint.
And the Egyptian government – possibly a European colonial one, I don’t remember offhand – at one point sent the entire collection of the Cairo museum to France. The ship sank and everything was lost.
“You need your beast to be a right asshole, not just, ‘ugh people are exhausting and annoying.'”
By this metric, I am a Beast. Which makes me wonder: are there any Beauty and the Beast adaptations where the beast is a woman and the man is the beauty? Cause I’d read the shit out of that. Hell, I’d read a F/F Beauty and the Beast in a heartbeat.
@ Dread Pirate Rachel – Beauty and the Rake by Erica Monroe has a reverse beauty and the beast where the heroine is scarred and the hero is the hottie. The Rookery Rogues series is set in 1830s Whitechapel rookeries with commoners as the central characters and a bit of suspense in each story.
I have Bella and the Beast on my Wish List, but it sounds like a book I’d have to be in the right mood to read because of, well, reasons. The justification for the mummies kind of creeps me out although I know mummies weren’t exactly handled like human remains by the Western world during this time period.
What is your favorite of the Beauty & the Beast bunch?
Um, I’m looking at this on a small screen so I might be imagining it, but, does she have an ankle tattoo? I’m not a historian, but isn’t that weird?
In the book, she does have an ankle tattoo. It is remarked upon, but there are in-story reasons for it.
I feel like I’m becoming the resident salty bitch, but:
> They’ve all grown up in various places in Persia, and when we first meet Bella, she’s job hunting in her Persian clothing- which is so silly I had a hard time taking her seriously after that. Shockingly, everyone thinks she’s a dirty foreigner (not helped when she pulls a knife on a particularly nasty asshole), and won’t hire her.
Bothers me so hard. It’s actually not exactly a knock on the book, I just probably just wouldn’t be able to read this. I guess since Halloween just happened and I read so many “BUT IS IT REALLY BAD IF IT JUST MEANS YOU APPRECIATE THE CULTURE TO DRESS UP AS AN INDIAN PERSON” related things on the internet, I’m also more keyed up than usual. This gets to me because she’s seen as a “dirty foreigner” but then she can take off her Persian mode of dress and become an “acceptable white person” who is then deserving of the love an affection of a high born man. As a character, she becomes more “exotic” and interesting than the average regency wallflower because of the symbols of another culture. (Although in this case they are the main character’s culture too since she grew up there, so it’s not really a thing about the character but about the larger context of this novel.) The rest of us, the real “dirty foreigners” (which is just code for not white), we can’t take our faces off and we are almost never regency romance novel heroines, even though there was trade and exchange at the time. It’s the whole, “they want to be us, but they don’t want anything to do with us” deal.
This is actually why I was never able to read “Don’t Tempt Me” despite the fact that I’ve read every single other Loretta Chase novel.