A Curse So Dark and Lonely (The Cursebreaker, #1)

by Brigid Kemmerer

Discover the epic, contemporary fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast from Brigid Kemmerer: the first in the spellbinding Cursebreakers series.

'Everything you'd want in a retelling of a classic fairy tale' JODI PICOULT
'Absolutely spellbinding' STEPHANIE GARBER

Fall in love, break the curse.
Break the curse, save the kingdom.

Prince Rhen, the heir to Emberfall, is cursed. Forced to repeat the autumn of his eighteenth year over and over, he can only be freed by love. But at the end of each autumn he is transformed into a beast hell-bent on destruction, and after so many failed attempts, his kingdom and its people are barely holding on.

Harper's life has never been easy, but she's learned to be tough enough to survive. She won't let anything hold her back, not her cerebral palsy or her mother's deteriorating health. But when she is sucked into Rhen's world, nothing is as it seems. Powerful forces are standing against Emberfalll ... and it will take more than a broken curse to save it from utter ruin.

• ISBN10: 1681195100
• ISBN13: 9781681195100
• Publish Date: 7 January 2020 (first published 29 January 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Imprint: Bloomsbury YA
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 512
• Language: English

Reviews

[chillywilly]

What?! Like what the heck, how can she leave us hanging like that? I realize she has 2 more books in the series, so I will be reading those. Overall, I enjoyed the book. Harper the main character is likeable. I like that Harper isn't perfect as nobody is and she's okay with that. Rhen is not very likeable in the beginning and he knows this about himself to a degree as he talks about the difficulties he has with Harper to Grey his commanding guardsman. Grey is both likeable and dislikeable. It depends on the choices he has to make. Being a guardsman really comes first for him.

My favorite part is when Harper give Grey the nickname Scary Grey because of his stance as a guardsman and his duty to protect the prince, Rhen. There were 2 things I wish had been done differently. 1) At the beginning, the author's action scene when Harper is being taken and shortly there after, is disjointed with very short sentences. I found it to be annoying, but also the only time I really saw this happening in the book this way. 2) In some areas, I felt the author was very descriptive while other areas she wasn't. Like with Grey, I don't really recall much of his description except that he has dark messy hair, but Lilith is very detailed.

[Nessa Luna]

Love me a little sobbing session after chapter forty-one. Cancer fucking sucks yay

[bumblingbookworm]

DNFed at 104 pages. I’m definitely in a weird reading mood, this is super hyped but I’m just so bored right now. I’m going to put this down for now and maybe I’ll pick it back up again in August for book club (if it goes ahead).

[vagasker]

And did I love this book!! Sometimes I am wondering if I am getting too old to read YA novels but then I read one like this one and I am thinking "hell no I will never be too old to be swooning over a good romance in a fantasy setting". Harper the main character was absolutely great. No Mary-Sue or anything, she felt like a real character with her own problems and weaknesses but still managed to be a bad-ass. I didn't care much for Rhen (the other main character), but boy.. Grey made up for that double. Grey made me feel like a giggly teenager again and I loved the feeling. I can't wait for the next book (and even though I am married I will be waiting for my own Grey to sweep me off of my feet hahaha).

[alindstadtcorbeax]

Star Rating:—> 5 Stars
AT LEAST HALF ALL OF THE CONSTELLATION’S WORTH OF STARS

Man oh man oh man. So ridiculously good. Just when I thought I couldn’t bear to read another beauty & the beast retelling... BOOM; I read this. Aaaand my life is forever changed.

And oh yeah I read this in like... HALF A DAY! THAT is how effing good this is. I mean its close to 500 pgs! Only other book I’ve ever done that with was Crooked Kingdom (SOC #2).

RTC

[llamareads]

I like Beauty and the Beast retellings, and this book kept popping up on my radar, so I was excited when my library hold first came in. Unfortunately, this one missed the mark for me.

I’ll start out with one of my favorite parts of the story. Rather than there being one woman to break the curse, there’s instead a Groundhog Day-like aspect to the story. The castle (and everyone in it) are trapped in a repeating cycle, forced to relive the same three-ish months over and over. Everything - from the music being played to the flowers to the food being served - is replicated day by day. At the end of the cycle (or when Rhen dies) everything resets, and Grey, Rhen’s sole remaining guard, is given the opportunity to kidnap another girl that might break the curse.

That’s right, kidnaps. With most Beauty and the Beast retellings, the non-beast protagonist usually has some sort of choice in going to the Beast’s place, even when it’s a rather pointless choice between that or death, or doing it to save a relative, or something like that. Harper’s straight up kidnapped from modern-day Washington, D.C. Having grown up reading lots of 80s-era portal fantasies, I really wanted to like this aspect of the book, but it felt off to me. Sure, Harper tries to drag Rhen and Grey into something resembling the 21st century, but it’s all very superficial.

And here we get to my main issue with the book: Harper. The level of not like ~other girls~-ness is just, too damn high. She likes horses, not dresses. She’s frankly nauseated by the piles of jewels in her room. She doesn’t react the same as every single other one of the hundreds (hundreds!) of girls they’ve kidnapped. It’s never-ending and exhausted. It’s not that I necessarily disagreed with her actions, just that everything had to be viewed from the lens of how she was SO MUCH BETTER than any other woman. The only thing I liked about her was the cerebral palsy rep, which felt very well done.

As for the other MC, Rhen was somehow even more annoying. After however many repetitions, he was still ridiculously self-centered, and he took the whole tortured, forced-to-be-evil nonsense to the extreme. It took a comment from Harper for him to realize that the point of the curse was not just to torment him but to topple his country. Too much of his (limited) character growth felt like he was only making the change for Harper, that he was somehow being redeemed by Harper and, oof, it didn’t sit well with me.

“My father once said we are all dealt a hand at birth. A good hand can ultimately lose—just as a poor hand can win—but we must all play the cards fate deals. The choices we face may not be the choices we want, but they are choices nonetheless.”

That's not to say the book is a complete loss, even though I didn't care for the main characters. The plot is standard fantasy fare, and there are some good moments. I loved Harper and Grey's card playing sessions, for instance.

So, overall, while the plot and setting were fine, the characters didn’t work for me.

[girlinthepages]

*Thank you so much to Bloomsbury for providing a free ARC in exchange for an honest review!*

I love a good Beauty and the Beast retelling. In fact, most of my all time favorite fantasy novels are Beauty and the Beast retellings (ACOTAR, Cruel Beauty, etc), so I had pretty high hopes going into A Curse So Dark and Lonely. Coupled with the fact that it merges a fantasy world with the modern world, I knew I was going to enjoy my first reading experience with Brigid Kemmerer's work.

As with any Beauty and the Beast retelling, the story follows an intelligent and young protagonist, Harper, who is taken against her will from her home of Washington D.C. to a fantasy world called Emberfall where Prince Rhen is cursed to repeat the same season over and over again until he can find someone to fall in love with him. As each season ends unsuccessfully, he turns into a dangerous beast that ultimately ends up terrorizing and killing more and more of the subjects of Emberfall (and sometimes the girls who are brought for him to court as well). Though this is fairly in line with the traditional Beauty and the Beast story many of us know, there are a few new twists. Harper is from a different world (our modern era) and she also has Cerebral Palsy. I admittedly don't know too much about her condition, but I felt the author did a good job integrating it into the story and having the characters talk openly about it and help show Harper that it did not need to be viewed as a weakness. The "Beast" character, Prince Rhen, has a darker burden in this retelling as he is uncontrollably violent in his Beast form, and is tormented by a seductive enchantress (Lilith) who put the curse upon him after she felt scored by him. There's also a third major character at play, Grey, Rhen's only remaining guard and a fiercely loyal character with a few secrets of his own.

There were a lot of things about this story that I enjoyed. I liked seeing Harper balance belonging to two worlds, and I absolutely loved her posing as the "Princess of Disi" in Emberfall. I loved some of the secondary, non-POV characters such as Grey and Noah, and I enjoyed the dynamic of the characters from both of Harper's worlds ultimately colliding and having to learn to co-exist with each other's realities. It made the fantasy feel lighter and less daunting in a way for a not-so-frequent fantasy reader such as myself since it the story has ties to the modern world.

However, probably because I have read so many Beauty and the Beast retellings that have become all time favorites, I did find some things about this story that ultimately underwhelmed me. First and foremost, there was really zero explanation of the magic system- how does this portal between the two worlds work? How are they connected? I have so many questions. Secondly, the "villain" felt pretty flimsy to me, and I didn't really sense much motivation for why she did the things she did (and she was also too powerful and her name is Lilith which is really on the nose if you ask me. Can we please stop naming our female villains Lilith?) I also never really felt a strong connection between Harper and Rhen, and was much more shipping her and Grey, and because of this the story really started dragging about halfway through for me.

However, the ending was quite engaging! I loved the collision of Harper's two worlds, the battles, how Harper is badass enough to go into battle herself, and I honestly did not see the twists coming! I liked how the story didn't "end" when the worst possible thing happened, but rather it kept going and pushing through those horrible outcomes and pushed the characters to continue to maneuver around them keep fighting. I also adore Noah and want him and Jake to continue to live in Emberfall and be adorable and bring the miracle of modern medical knowledge to the fantasy realm.

Overall: While A Curse So Dark and Lonely is a solid YA fantasy read, it pales a bit in comparison to some truly epic and swoon-worthy Beauty and the Beast retellings that are already out there. However, it's strong ending with surprising plot twists has ensured that I will be continuing on with the sequel!This review was originally posted on Girl in the Pages

[Brianna]

DNF @ page 230. I just couldn’t keep going with this. I was bored and finding it very slow and just wasn’t excited to read. I might try and pick it up again at some point but I’m done for now.

[reveriesociety_]

Ok, I did enjoy this book so much. And if I'd loved it a bit more, it'd have been a 4 star rating (not quite 5 because it wasn't mind-blowing). The ending just fell a little flat for me. I'm aware that this has a sequel, but I also saw it could stand alone. With that in mind, the ending for the characters whose story should have wrapped-up nicely, just kind of didn't. I think expected more closure and explanation in that sense.

What did they learn? What did the accomplish beyond the obvious? I'm not sure and drives me nuts :(

[blackbibliophile]

An AMAZING retelling of Beauty & the Beast! I hope there is a sequel 👏🏾👏🏾