Nyx has been raised as the disposable twin, the less adorable one, who has trained all her life to be married off to the demon tyrant and to find a way to kill him and free her people. She’s resented every second of it, and although she hates the idea that she’ll very likely die along with her enemy, she’s determined to do what needs to be done. And then she meets her new husband and falls in love. And then she meets his shadow and falls in love again. So things are…complicated.

A solid Beauty and the Beast retelling, with some fairly strong Howl’s Moving Castle vibes. My only quibble is that the ending drags just a bit, and it didn’t sweep me off my feet as much as I wanted it to. ( )

Lots of similarities to Beauty and the Beast. Which is fine with me as it was always a favorite of mine. However, the world is completely original and fantastic!

Nyx has been trained since the age of nine to kill the "Gentle Lord" who holds the land captive. They are under constant threat of his demons and there is no way to escape. The Lord is known for his unfair bargains and one of these bargains left Nyx betrothed to him. So she is to wed and bed him, then destroy him!

Nyx holds a lot of anger and I do not blame her. She has never been shown love by her family. She has always been known to them as a sacrifice while her twin sister is lavished with attention. I'd be pissed too! She is stuck paying the price for her father's selfishness and foolish bargain.

The Gentle Lord tells her to call him Ignifex and there is more to him than meets the eye. Part kind, part wicked and full of secrets! Then there is Shade. A shadow-like image of him that takes form at night. He too is kind but has secrets. To top it all off is the castle itself. I want to visit it! It sounds amazing. Some rooms wonderful, others horrifying (I'll just skip those, thank you so much).

There is a sort of romance triangle as both men care for Nyx and she is attracted to both. It surely can't help that, besides the eyes, they look the same.

I was hoping for a bit more on the "destroying the Lord" bit but the romance and mysterious secrets heavily trump that part of the book. Otherwise, I deeply enjoyed this.

The writing is very well done and very rich in characters and everything that surrounds them. I adored the characters. Very unique. Each have crucial flaws and each great strength. I couldn't help but like them. Except the father and aunt. While they are well written, their characters are less than scum.

I will assuredly be reading more by Rosamund Hodge in the future! ( )

Cruel Beauty is a Beauty and the Beast retelling which centers on Nyx Triskelion, a girl raised to one day sacrifice herself in order to avenge the death of her mother and save all of Arcadia. Of course having no prospect of a future besides marrying the beast of a demon lord she must eventually assassinate, Nyx breeds hatred in her heart towards her family and situation. However, once Nyx enters the shifting house of her husband, she begins to uncover truths about him, herself, and her world that completely change everything she has trained for. Nyx must battle between giving in to what she wants and actually leading her own life or meeting the expectations that have ruled over her life thus far. She must question her own desires but also the intent of others. And of course, as the story of Beauty and the Beast goes, she begins to see the "Gentle Lord" as not so beastly after all and against all odds, feels like she might have actually gotten a chance at love and a future.

All of this sounds like a pretty interesting premise...and it is, but I can't say so for the book itself. Cruel Beauty honestly bored me from the very beginning but knowing that some books start slow, I kept going. And only about halfway through the book did my interest pique even a little. It seemed pretty clear that Shade and Ignifex must be one and the same and yet were somehow separated. Learning the story behind why this happened and how it could be fixed interested me only for a moment though, as the book continued to be boring, annoying, and downright confusing. The Kindly Ones?? The Sparrow??? These concepts were really trippy and made no sense. We never know what or who the Sparrow is supposed to be or anything about the Kindly Ones really besides the bargains they make. And then when Nyx calls upon The Kindly Ones in order to repent for her betrayal and be with her love again, the confusion hits its max. Um...what now? Seriously, I have no idea what even happened. Why did the Kindly Ones leave? What in the world was the Sparrow even talking about? Did it save them? Did they get thrown into the darkness like Nyx proposed? Why did they come back into the light? I know the Sparrow said something about they might find their way back but literally there was just a moment of them falling in darkness and forgetting everything and then all the sudden with no action or even thought on their part: woohoo! It's all good! I mean the Sparrow could have just been called Deus Ex Machina. To have trudged through the boring and annoying parts of this book, (which was most of it) only to get to an ending that makes no sense and yet somehow manages to make things "happily ever after" was a huge disappointment, especially after hearing so many great things about the book.

So why did I find this book so boring and annoying? Well, first of all Nyx constantly thinks of how much she hates everything except she shouldn't and maybe doesn't really? And the main action occurring across this whole novel is simply her search through the rooms of the house and finding clues and setting Ignifex off from going places she isn't supposed to. And this house seems like it would be pretty cool considering it shifts around and sounds similar to Howl's moving castle but...the rooms are barely described as if this is hardly an important detail with such a thing as romance to be attended to. And in my opinion, the romance didn't even make much sense. Why do they even like each other? I didn't see much of a reason or bonding between them. I certainly didn't care about any of the characters myself. Nothing about The Kindly Ones makes any sense, nor the whole thing about the house being in a nut and a pearl and conch and a jar which is sealed off. And that ending made least sense of all. I don't even get where this story was supposed to go. And the Hermetic symbols seemed important at the beginning but then stopped mattering after that and were never explained.

So, I know my opinion is an unpopular one but I was just so disappointed by this. I was really hoping that something at the end would make everything make sense and pull together instead of doing the opposite. I feel like a lot more could have been made of the part of the premise before The Kindly Ones and The Sparrow and this confusing curse came in. I did manage to find one thing I liked about the book though, which was this one line that stood out to me from the rest and felt really descriptive of the emotion it was portraying, "I felt like a cobweb strung across the doorway, trembling in the draft and about to tear if I moved." Can't really say that this line redeemed Cruel Beauty for me though. ( )

Reducing this book to just a beauty and the beast retelling is a goddamn insult to the book ✨4.5✨ ( )

Want your Beauty and the Beast retellings to skew more old school (Psyche and Eros) and reference Bluebeard too? Then read this book. It's Til We Have Faces meets Pandora's Box meets Howl's Moving Castle meets Rose Daughter. I LOVED THIS WOW ( )