A Near Future Retelling of Beauty and the BeastAlainn’s father is not a bad man. He’s a genius and an inventor. When he’s hired to create the robot Rose, Alainn knows taking the money is a mistake. Rose acts like a human. She looks exactly like Alainn. But, something in her comes out wrong.To save her father from a five year prison sentence, Alainn takes Rose’s place. She says goodbye to the sun … Rose’s place. She says goodbye to the sun and goes to live in a tower no human is allowed to enter. She becomes the prisoner of a man no human is allowed to see.
Believing that a life of servitude lies ahead, Alainn finds a very different fate awaits her in the company of the strange, scarred recluse.
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“People always have such a hard time believing that robots could do bad things.”
She pulled back to whisper, “Because they’re machines, like toasters. I work on them for a living. They can malfunction, but they’re not going to hatch up some elaborate extortion plot, that’s what humans do.”
…
“…You think they’re toasters, and maybe they are. But my father gave those tools the ability to form their own personalities and think for themselves. If you give a toaster a choice, it might choose to be a torture device. People just assume that we can control robots and they’re safe, but they’re not even safe when we can control them.”
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What a marvelous, dark and clever addition to the fairy tale-retelling genre – and to female-protagonist sci-fi… I am a fan of both, although have found both becoming rather overplayed lately, with a concomitant decline in the quality of the stories being put out. Still, I remain (perhaps foolishly) optimistic, since I find that both types of stories, when done well, are really fun and enjoyable for me. This one renewed my faith – and my optimism.
I love the concept of multiple iterations of the Rose AI. In an ever-increasingly digitized world, I seem to be one of only a few holdouts on the “hooray that everything is linked and connected and operates via computer without my doing anything!!” bandwagon… I guess I’m either old enough – or Luddite enough, teehee – to still worry about what will happen if/when the computers take over. Chalk it up to HAL or Robert Heinlein or even the first Transformers or Matrix movies, but I don’t trust that the computers will be satisfied with being happy helpers once they’re fully independent enough to actually run things… This book took that (I think healthy) fear and played it out on a very clever and engaging level, and the track with the Beauty and the Beast mythology provided a great platform for doing so.
The writing style is easy and enjoyable. The characters are delightfully complex and fully human – even when they’re not. And the setting/future world imagined here was altogether plausible (and, accordingly to me, scary). This is a very fun book, and definitely worth the read.
My review copy was provided by NetGalley.
This was not your classic beauty and the beast tale. It held the elements with the crazy inventor father, and threw in an overly smart brother to one-up the norm, but rather than the past this took place in the future. A future where robots and AI’s live among us. It made me think of a cross between the Korean tv drama I Am Not A Robot (love story of boy meets girl and thinks she’s a robot) and the movie iRobot with will smith. An interesting weave of these two things to make a unique and interesting beauty and the beast tale. I completely loved the spin.
And I loved the characters. Alainn is a strong, independent, and I fully believe the only sane one in her family. She is haunted by her past yet still she willingly saves her father from prison by pretending to be a robot. Her overcoming her fears and falling in love was sweet and kind of awe-inspiring. Lorccan seems uptight and a bit weird (in a padded room kind of way) but as he opens up more and we peer into his past we see why he turned out how he did and how he and Alainn help one another heal little by little and how good they are for one another.
As far as villains go Rose was amazing. She was downright terrifying, have nightmares about her, evil. I mean she made Viki is iRobot seem downright sane. Her plot was kind of genius, but she made the fatal mistake robots and AI’s tend to at the end of the world movies and books, she underestimated the human will to survive. Alainn’s father is a try genius for creating her but she is like Pandora’s box….better it never happens to begin with. The fact that she was a physical twin of the heroine made it all the more creepy.
All in all a fantastic read.
I loved this entertaining retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, it kept me captivated, had great characters and was an innovative take on a classic tale. I loved the authors use of AI’s in this story, keeping up the intrigue and suspense as to their intentions well. I also liked her different uses of “rose” throughout the story, forming links back to the original tale. Your heart breaks for Lorccan and the life his past has forced onto him and you can not help but like Alainn; she is tough, compassionate but also somewhat damaged. Their slowly developing romance was warm and captivating, drawing you along with them and making you want them to find their HEA. I really enjoyed this story, it had mystery, intrigue, romance and some great twists
Now out of all the Disney Tales Beauty & The Beast has got to be my all time favorite story, I’m a sucker for the plucky maiden and the misunderstood disfigured hero, so it stands to reason Ensnared and myself would fit together like a cuppa & biccy, a dog & a bone, and it did.
From the moment i started reading i was fascinated by this totally different and somewhat weird retelling of a futuristic beauty & the beast. It shouldn’t have worked but it did.
I found myself cheering on Alainne as she pretended to be Rose 76GF and i got very caught up in the whole tale.
Alainne herself i found to be a very unselfish individual, all she wanted was to help her dad and if that meant putting herself out well, so be it. There was also some past issues that she still has trouble coming to terms with, this gives her a bit of a hero complex as she wants to save everyone, even at the cost of her own safety.
Now Lorccan Garbhan, mmm what to make of him as a character, I would say that our Mr Garbhan is quite a strange fella, isolated from society by what i surmise where very paranoid unloving parents, Lorccan has evolved into an eccentric anxious individual, afraid of the outside world, he is also heavily scarred which adds to his apprehension of outsiders.
Lorccan Wants a robot to help teach him to interact with others mainly a love interest Shelby who he has only spoken to on the phone.
I don’t want to give much more away I will just say, that I couldn’t help smiling as these two emotionally scarred people fell for each other, It was lovely watching them both discover each other a calm before the storm. there is action, love, drama, psychotic robots and cute robot monkeys.
I would have liked a slightly different ending, not as open-ended, but that in no way takes away from this marvelously inventive tale and is just a personal preference, give this whimsical story a go, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much you enjoy it, I devoured Ensnared in one sitting it hooked me like a duck.
I received a free e-arc of this ebook from NetGalley for a review and this is my own honest opinion.
Reviewed By Beckie Bookworm
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Although I received a copy of this e-book from the publisher, all opinions remain my own.
This book was quite the ride. When I saw it was about an AI robot, I figured things wouldn’t be going well for the humans. That’s usually how it goes. What I didn’t expect was how much I would learn to love the characters. The book seemed super weird at first. Man wants AI robot to be his company for dinner each night, that’s it. But the man sits at a darkened end of the table, invisible to his company. Unseen, the stranger is more compelling then Alainn thought he would be.
I devoured this book in a day. Watching, waiting what was going to happen to Alainn kept me going. Then wondering what was going on kept me reading. My husband was amazed I finished this one so quickly.
Totally recommend this book to lovers of the sci-fi. It does have a few adult situations and does have a disclaimer. Not for young readers. A great one though. Pick it up!