How can a woman cursed to look like a beast make a handsome prince propose marriage?Sybil de la Roche was once the belle of the court. Now she is more hideous than any woman in the kingdom. To restore her beauty, she must receive a marriage proposal. Forty years and twenty-eight rejections later, she decides to break the curse on her own. But when a personable young man arrives, she is torn … torn between hope and dread.
Prince Gerald is widely renowned as the best-looking man in Savony. On a quest to find a mage who has disappeared for years, he is stranded at a remote manor in a snowstorm. His interest is piqued by the mysterious woman in the manor, but his desire to get to know her is foiled by her determination to avoid him.
For maximum enjoyment, it is recommended that you read Book 1, Till Midnight, prior to The Beast and the Beauty.
more
I loved this re telling! Sybil was the perfect beast she was powerful awesome kind and well read. I really liked how she had both characteristics of Belle and Beast. I loved the way the story flowed and how it followed the Disney movie but had a lot of new twists.
I really loved Gerard too he was the perfect gentleman book lover and warrior. This book was so good I knew it was a series but I thought it was a stand alone it’s really not. Now I need to read the other ones because this ends on a cliff hanger.
For all fans of Beauty and The Beast this is a must read. It just pulls toy into the story. I love the idea of the role reversal it makes the story fun.
Aya Ling has done a very thorough job thinking through the quirks of gender-bending fairy tales! I knew she was setting Gerald up to be the Beauty with all that hype about being pretty enough to be a girl, but I wasn’t sure how likable vain, aging court belle trapped in a beast’s body was going to be. Clearly, making them both bookworms still works on a gender reversal! Ah the power of novels! I can’t wait to see what goes down in the reversed Sleeping Beauty!
Swapping gender roles for the retelling of this tale was a surprise to me and I thought it was such a cool twist to the story. Here we have Lady Sybil de la Roche, once a gorgeous but vain and rather callous woman who is cursed to look like a demon by a jealous witch. As part of the curse, she and her servants never age and at the start of the book, decades have passed since they were cursed and the world and their original lives have passed them by. Then Gerald, the second-eldest of 12 princes, and incredibly beautiful for a man, admired by women and men alike, is stranded near Sybil’s mansion due to a snow storm while he is on a quest.
The characters are well written, the story is good, well-paced with a quite a bit of tension building up towards the end. Some people may not like the frequent references to Gerald’s beauty, because he was a strong male lead character. I think what the author may have been trying to convey was that even though Gerald was over the top handsome and Sybil, when cursed, was an ugly monster, in the end what counted was their character and how Sybil grew as a person. They learn to love each other for who they were, not how they looked. To me, that was the real story. I truly enjoyed it and am waiting for the next book in the series. And, while you don’t need to read the first book of the series, ‘Till Midnight’, to enjoy this one, it helps with the backstory and is a good read also.