Welcome back, everyone! I am still in South Korea and tomorrow I will celebrate my thirty-fifth birthday! Wowza! I never thought I’d be experiencing such a trip in my lifetime, let alone for a bit of a milestone occasion. I am sure Sarah is steadily steering the S.S. Smart Bitch in my absence. Oh captain, my captain! Also, we’re in mid-April now! How did that happen? The spring always feels like it flies by. Maybe … Continue reading Links: Higher Ed, Little Golden Books, & More →
Trigger warning for on-page suicide attempt Claudia and I (CarrieS) are suckers for good historical fiction, good historical romance, and Beauty and the Beast retellings. So we were excited about At Summer’s End, in which an artist (Bertie, short for Alberta) takes a job at an English estate following WWI and meets an isolated, traumatized, and scarred survivor named Julian. While this book did a decent job with the tricky themes of PTSD and disfigurement … Continue reading At Summer’s End by Courtney Ellis →
Content warnings: Internalised homophobia. Use of the word sodomite (historically appropriate, but still pretty awful in its impact). Briarley is the story you get if Beauty’s father had been a country parson with enough backbone to tell the Beast no, and enough compassion to stay with the Beast in his daughter’s place. It is touching and kind and charming, and often very funny, and I was absolutely delighted by it. There was once a country … Continue reading Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray →
While reading My Darling Duke, I realized that as much as I rail against the popularity of magic peen as a plot device, magic cooch is not an improvement. Kitty Danvers and her group of wallflowery friends are veterans of multiple unsuccessful marriage market seasons in London. Kitty is a world-weary twenty-three, and with her hopes for a husband and children fading, she and her friends decide to be “sinful.” For Kitty, that means claiming … Continue reading My Darling Duke by Stacy Reid →
Bookish and The Beast isn’t a WOW book, but it’s a comforting, often funny YA read for romance fans who are either geeks or geek-sympathetic and who enjoy beauty and the beast variations. This is the third book in the “Once Upon a Con” series and while it works as a stand-alone, characters from the rest of the series make appearances. While the plot is nonsensical and the main characters are bland, the supporting characters … Continue reading Bookish and the Beast by Ashley Poston →
The Beast of Beswick is what you get when you put Beauty and the Beast and The Taming of the Shrew into a blender with a whole lot of feminism and drink the results. The heroine, Astrid, is beautiful, bookish and prickly; full of feminist rage; and determined to protect her sweet, pretty, but surprisingly shrewd younger sister, Isobel. The hero, Thane, is horribly scarred; very brooding and moody; and rather inclined to embrace the … Continue reading The Beast of Beswick by Amalie Howard →
One of our keen readers suggested that I might enjoy A Curse So Dark and Lonely which is a romance-centric YA Beauty and the Beast retelling in which the heroine, a modern day teen with cerebral palsy, is transported to an alternate fairytale world and meets a Prince who periodically turns into a monster and eats everyone in sight. This keen reader thought I might like the book and the reader was not wrong. I liked … Continue reading A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer →
I’ve always loved Beauty and the Beast stories. I have a whole rant about how the point of the story is that even though Beauty might grow to like the Beast while she is his captive, she doesn’t love him until he releases her. Some adaptations work with this idea better than others. The Beast’s Heart does a remarkable job of including the poetry of the story while omitting some of its more problematic elements. … Continue reading The Beast’s Heart by Leife Shallcross →
Bed of Flowers is a historical that has a lot of things going for it: it’s got a loveably grumpy hero, it depicts female friendships, and it features secondary characters of color. I appreciated all of those elements, and I liked the vaguely gothic feel it had. I really, really enjoyed this book, but I have to admit the ending was a little weak. That said, I was willing to overlook it because my experience … Continue reading Bed of Flowers by Erin Satie →
The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare is a fairytale Regency that blends Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella and Batman. Seriously. And it’s amazing. I actually read it twice. The first time I was at home on a Friday night, enjoying a few rum and Cokes and unwinding. Apparently I can have exactly two drinks before I start loving everything and then forgetting I loved it. I woke up the next morning surprised to see … Continue reading The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare →
In our effort to keep you informed on all things Beauty and the Beast, I have been WAITING for the French version to arrive on streaming services. It was released in France a few years ago, and had a brief run in American the theaters last year – so brief that I did not get to see it because I took a nap or something (or maybe it didn’t even make it to Boston?). Anyway, … Continue reading Movie Review: Beauty and the Beast (2014) →
