Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is her debut effort?! Fuck me and my writerly pretensions.
The story plucks out the father bargains daughter away to monster theme from Beauty and the Beast (or La Belle et la Bete) and then turns the self-sacrificing Belle on her head and makes her MAD at the world for the unfairness of it all. It’s brilliant. Nyx has been brought up to sacrifice herself because her father made a fool’s bargain. And because the monster in her future is also the wizard who oppresses the world, her father spent years training her in hermetic magic so she can kill the beast and free her people. (more…)
Caught in a book! 