A New York Times bestseller!”Has everything you’d want in a retelling of a classic fairy tale.” – Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of A Spark of Light and Small Great Things“Absolutely spellbinding.” – Stephanie Garber, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Caraval and LegendaryIn a lush, contemporary fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Brigid Kemmerer gives readers … Legendary
In a lush, contemporary fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Brigid Kemmerer gives readers another compulsively readable romance perfect for fans of Marissa Meyer.
Fall in love, break the curse.
It once seemed so easy to Prince Rhen, the heir to Emberfall. Cursed by a powerful enchantress to repeat the autumn of his eighteenth year over and over, he knew he could be saved if a girl fell for him. But that was before he learned that at the end of each autumn, he would turn into a vicious beast hell-bent on destruction. That was before he destroyed his castle, his family, and every last shred of hope.
Nothing has ever been easy for Harper. With her father long gone, her mother dying, and her brother barely holding their family together while constantly underestimating her because of her cerebral palsy, she learned to be tough enough to survive. But when she tries to save someone else on the streets of Washington, DC, she’s instead somehow sucked into Rhen’s cursed world.
Break the curse, save the kingdom.
A prince? A monster? A curse? Harper doesn’t know where she is or what to believe. But as she spends time with Rhen in this enchanted land, she begins to understand what’s at stake. And as Rhen realizes Harper is not just another girl to charm, his hope comes flooding back. But powerful forces are standing against Emberfall . . . and it will take more than a broken curse to save Harper, Rhen, and his people from utter ruin.
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Brigid Kemmerer is such a great author. This book was basically a remake of Beauty and the Beast. It is great!
Loved this book- can’t wait to read the next one in the series!
I loved this interesting retelling of beauty and the beast. I love strong, yet flawed and vulnerable, characters. Harper doesn’t let her disability slow her down. She is fierce, courageous and likable. Prince Rhen is arrogant but trying to become a better man and it’s hard not to root for him to defeat his demons. This was a quick and enjoyable read.
I liked the beast. It had a princess who was cool.My favorite character is Grey.
I truly wished I liked this book. Someone tell me if the second book made up for the first one being such a let down.
Fantastic Read
Synopsis aside, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when I got this book. This is such a great spin on Beauty and the Beast. The story and character development blew me away, my favorite character was Grey, closely followed by Harper.
I liked Harper so much because she was so real from the Cerebral Palsy to her take no shit attitude. She is such a relatable character and I loved her.
I’ve been meaning to read this Beauty and The Beast retelling for a while but I was worried it would be too ‘YA’ for me.
The beginning was a little slow but as the tale unfolded I became invested.
All the characters are likeable – I just love the disability rep with the main character Harper.
This has all the ingredients for a typical angsty romance – but where the beginning was slow, the romance felt a little rushed for me. I was actually rooting for Grey! Although, I wonder if there is a potential love triangle blooming?
The ending saved the story for me – I had managed to avoid spoilers and the little twist that leaves it open for the next book was really fun to read!
I wish this book came out when I was a teen – because the teenage me would have absolutely loved this!
I can’t wait to read the sequel.
I recommend for anyone who would like to read a light fairytale romance.
A Curse So Dark and Lonely is a retelling (but it steers off the path) of Beauty and The Beast. Harper and her brother Jake are struggling to survive while their mom has cancer and dad isn’t anywhere to be found. Jake is involved with some shady people, and when Harper sees a woman in distress—attempting kidnapping, really, she jumps into action and finds herself in another dimension, in Emberfall. Her captors, Gray and Rhen, have only one more chance at breaking the curse.
I love Harper so much. She has cerebral palsy, which among many things affects her gait, but it doesn’t stop her. What I love so much is that there is nothing that can hold her back from getting what she wants. And Rhen? The charming prince has tried again and again to break the curse—but with Harper, it’s different. It’s more than what he could want.
Gray is also high up there with my favorite characters. He is selfless, loyal, and compassionate all at the same time. He would give his life for Harper or Rhen without a blink of the eye. No spoilers—but how could you do that to him!? The ending was something I didn’t see coming.
What I needed more of in this book was romance. There was thing Rhen did (no spoilers) that made you love them together but there wasn’t enough to believe it. I really struggled with finishing this book because I needed to believe she loved him.
3/5!
What an amazing read this was! I see that book 3 will be released in January 2021 and wait with bated breath for the outcome!
I loved everything about this book, including the emotion evoked in the title. The author wrote the book from two perspectives and I loved how well she voiced each character. The character development was really well done and the author stayed true to the story all the way to the fantastic end. I loved it so much I immediately read the second in the series.
I read this in one sitting. It was interesting and fast paced and an overall super awesome book.
A great way to re-spin the tale of Beauty and the Beast. What made this story feel so fresh was the modernity to it. It blends the real world and the fantastical world very well and thoughtfully. Firstly, Harper is from Washington D.C. and is kidnapped and brought to the world of Emberfall, a mystical land. Harper is truly a force to be reckoned with as she tries to reconcile her new reality, that magic has trapped her in this world where the prince’s hopes lie with her.
Their dynamic is fresh because even though they both know that she has to fall in love with him in order to break the curse, they are not forcing that on each other or the reader. The very idea of whether they do fall in love is left entirely up in the air. However, they have such a strong dynamic with one another that makes them unique. Harper spends most of the novel trying to help Prince Rhen try to gather his kingdom together with false promises, an alliance with the kingdom of DC. They play off each other and grow stronger together. Rhen has lived in fear of the monster and the curse, letting it control him and forget his kingdom, but now he has the chance to rally his kingdom together in the hopes of preventing war.
It was a strong idea brought to life by careful pacing and development. What is also great about the novel is that the curse was not placed there by a fairy in the hopes of teaching him a lesson; the curse was because he spurned the wrong women. Lilith is a malevolent force to be reckoned with and her voice captures that. She works as the perfect foil for Harper, and together they give the depth of the curse new dimension instead of letting it become repetitive.
The novel may be a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but many things make it different and wholly unique. The structure of the magic, the world-building, and the added element of an invading army give the idea some freshness to it and make it an exceptional and stand-out retelling.
Having little knowledge of Beauty and the Beast, I really didn’t know what to expect.
I love this story though!!
Rhen, oh my gosh, I’m so glad that Harper figured everything out that she needed to. They are going to be an amazing couple.
I did think Harper had some sparks with Grey too though, and a small part of me is sad they didn’t hook up instead.
I got sucked into this world of Emberfall just like Harper did, and now I pine for the next book in the series.
Fantasy fans, get this now!!!
Fantastic!
An new twist on a classic that was a lot of fun to read.
Beauty and the Beast has been told every which way right ? No, this author found a new way to twist modern times with another time and characters from both world into not a romantic tale. yes, not a romantic tale. I know “Oh but Yodamom Beauty and the Beast is Romance” This one is an action packed adventure filled with magic, bad guys, debts and all the complications of life. The romance is expected which is why when it isn’t front and center the story takes a new direction. There is a life beyond just falling in love. Yes, it’s true ! Then when the elephant in the room is highlighted, you know to break the curse the girl is not swooning and giggling. Ha ! It’s fantastic !
Great read, horrible cliffhanger. I had to order book 2 only minutes after finishing this
I glommed this book. Not only did I immediately want to ship Harper and Rhen, but I loved them separately, too. Harper is a delight, and her voice drove this story (and made me stay up way past my bedtime).
Beauty and the Beast retellings can be tricky to make feel fresh, but Brigid Kemmerer did just that. A Curse So Dark and Lonely is captivating from the first page, and allows both Harper and Rhen surprise one another along the way.
If you’ve been sleeping on this one, it’s time to dive in.
A fairly good B&B re-telling
I have so many thoughts about this book. There were so many things it did RIGHT and only a couple that I took issue with. But as always I start with the good things. First of all, THANK YOU FOR THE DISABILITY REPRESENTATION! I mean, It’s about time we had a YA Fantasy MC with a disability. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, YA Fantasy as a genre tends to be the least diverse and one of the most widely consumed. So, I’m glad to see more books with different perspectives getting published.
At times, I worried about the book being written in 1st person dual POV and one POV was from a fully-abled character and the other was our MC w/ cerebral palsy. The reason this worried me is that I was afraid that we would fall into the trope of the fully abled character being an overbearing ass who couldn’t grasp what it might be like to live with a disability and this is tiresome to me. Luckily, that wasn’t the case. They had a few small hurdles, but the MC was independent enough that she overcame them easily and the fully-abled character was able to see her inner strength. This was done really well. I LOVE when characters challenge their own preconceived notions and you can see real growth in them.
The villain was a woman. This is actually more rare than you might think in YA Fantasy, and even rarer is when the female villain is truly terrifying and doesn’t seem to be written as if she’s an overpowered mary sue having a hissy fit. This villain was legit crazy, and legit scary. Her calculated cruelty and the pleasure she derived from it all while grasping for control and power. It was believable and I like when villains are written well enough to actually raise the stakes of a book.
The world-building was OK. There was enough in the socio-political aspect of the world-building to constitute it being effective and giving a clear picture of the Kingdom of Emberfall, but I did think it was a little bit thrown away. There are only two characters for a lot of the book that are inhabitants of the castle and they were cut off from the rest of the world for five years before the beginning of the book. This made is really convenient for all of the main characters to ‘re-discover’ the world along with the reader and it fell flat for me.
A couple of things I didn’t like
I really wish that Rehn, our love interest and cursed prince, had been bisexual. This is probably strange to hear but, he had such a complicated relationship with Grey (his bodyguard) and there as a missed opportunity here with the ambiguity of that relationship especially at the end and not knowing exactly how the curse is broken or if Harper was the one who did it. Also, he’s been trying to break this curse for 327 seasons or something… which is a really long time. They talk ad nauseum about how they have tried LITERALLY EVERYTHING to break the curse…. I mean, you didn’t think about maybe trying to break the curse with a guy? It seems really strange to have NEVER tried that when half the book is Rehn and Grey telling Harper about how it’ll never be broken because they’ve tried everything under the sun… including multiple suicide attempts….
Lastly, Grey.
Hear me out, I LOVE HIS CHARACTER. I love his character more than I like the MC and the Love interest. I wanted her to end up with Grey actually. I wanted more of Grey. Grey popped off the page in a way that actually distracted readers from the main conflict which, kudos, means you wrote a truly dynamic character. He’s what I call a ‘magnet character’ and they can be troublesome things in literature. In this book, Grey steals the show, and that’s not great for the execution of this story. I am excited that book 2 will feature more of his story which is left up in the air at the end of this novel, but, the author really needed to rein him in more or not give the readers hints of a spark between Harper and Grey if it was never going to happen. This left me frustrated and a little cheesed off at the end honestly.
Other than that I think this book was fairly well written and a good re-telling. It lost one star because of the lack of bisexual representation, missed opportunities, and Grey literally stealing the show all the time. LOL! GIVE ME MORE GREY!
There are so many retellings out there in the world, especially of Beauty and the Beast. A Curse So Dark and Lonely brought something different though. First off, I loved that this mixed high fantasy and urban fantasy. Urban fantasy is one of my favorite genres so I was happy to see it incorporated here.
The characters: Rhen, Grey, and Harper are an amazing set of characters. All three of them are flawed in their own way, but strong. I adored the dynamic between all three. The friendships. They made my heart happy. I’m pretty sure the next book will focus a bit more on Grey, and I can’t wait to learn more about the grumpy guardsman. I loved seeing how these three dealt with the curse, all of them experienced so much despair, guilt, and loneliness.
Harper was a badass, I loved the fact that author included the cerebral palsy rep. She was strong and brave throughout. Rhen was angst-ridden and troubled. He had so much pain in him it was impossible not to fall for him. Grey was a gem. He was even-tempered, and his loyalty to Rhen was amazing to read.
The plot: I won’t say too much because spoilers! But this did follow the traditional Beauty and the Beast plot, i.e. Rhen must fall in love to break the curse, but there’s a darker tone to it. There’s also a focus on saving the kingdom of Emberfall from the creature. I thought the pacing was well done. When the action was slower we got to see Rhen, Harper, and Grey slowly learn to trust each other.
This is one of the best retellings I’ve ever read. I definitely recommend it!
I definitely enjoyed this fantasy take on Beauty and the Beast. I am newer to fantasy and still getting my bearings. I really enjoyed this one because of the tie to the world today. I could really see the story following Beauty and the Beast and I liked that I kind of knew what to expect. Grey was something that I was not expecting though. I really enjoyed his character. Each time I could see him longing for Harper, I was a little sad though. It was obvious she was brought for Rhen and I really loved Rhen and how he grew because of Harper. She was all the things that were good and it opened his eyes to all the things that he could be. I will read the next book because I really want to know what happens to Grey but I am glad this was a stand alone.
Not everyone is who they appear to be *insert Sherlock emoji here* oh wait it lets him stay …..