writehollydavis
Written on Sep 24, 2020
New York Times bestselling author Meagan Spooner spins a thoroughly thrilling Beauty and the Beast story for the modern age, expertly woven with spellbinding romance, intrigue, and suspense that readers won't soon be able to forget. Beauty knows the Beast's forest in her bones-and in her blood. After all, her father is the only hunter who's ever come close to discovering its secrets. So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters out of their comfortable home among the aristocracy and back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. Out in the wilderness, there's no pressure to make idle chatter with vapid baronessas...or to submit to marrying a wealthy gentleman. But Yeva's father's misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he'd been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance. The Beast. Deaf to her sisters' protests, Yeva hunts this strange creature back into his own territory-a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of magical creatures that Yeva's only heard about in fairy tales. A world that can bring her ruin, or salvation.
Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast?
- ISBN10 0062422286
- ISBN13 9780062422286
- Publish Date 20 April 2017 (first published 14 March 2017)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 22 August 2023
- Publish Country US
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc
- Imprint HarperTeen
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 384
- Language English
Reviews
Emma (SCR)
Written on Feb 25, 2020
This may be a re-telling but Meagan certainly makes it her own. With a change in location and family along with Beauty herself. Beauty is no damsel in distress in this story. No, she is a badass hunter who will fight to the very end. The Beast is, well the Beast, but I did enjoy the little paragraphs from his perspective when we did get them.
I loved the setting for this book. There is something about books set in eastern Europe that I like. It is a perfect setting for fantasy books.
The story was fun, romantic and enticing. I loved Meagan's style and I found myself listening more and more to the audio. I looked for every opportunity I could to spend even 5 minutes in this world. I would highly recommend this book to Beauty and the Beast and all fantasy lovers alike. I can't wait to read the rest of Meagan's books.
mrs_mander_reads
Written on Apr 30, 2019
Kat @ Novels & Waffles
Written on Jul 26, 2018
Beautiful Yeva grew up at her father's feet, listening to his stories of wonderful magic and cursed princes. She hung on his every word, drank in his tales of impossible quests and daring deeds like water. But eventually, the turn of time forced her to leave those stories behind – fairy tales are only for little children, after all. Her heart, however, didn't get the memo. The excitement, the adventure, the magic, of her father's stories never left her, and it filled her with want.
Yeva wants a lot of things. She wants to leave her suffocating small town behind. She wants to go hunting in the woods. She wants to avenge her father's murder and kill the Beast. She wants to be happy. But what is happiness and where can Yeva find it? Does it lie in the blood of revenge or in the arms of a lover? Ultimately, that is the question this thrilling and frosty retelling of Beauty and the Beast tries to answer.
“Because I thought I wouldn’t be happy until I left town to live in the wood, and then I thought I wouldn’t be happy until I could hunt every day, and then I thought I wouldn’t be happy until I avenged my father’s death.”
Spooner's rendition of the character, Beauty, is probably one of my favorite parts about this retelling. Yeva is not some helpless damsel-in-distress. Oh no. She is a strong-willed, arrow-slinging, dog-loving Huntress who acts and is not acted upon. When disaster strikes and her family has to swap their cozy home in the village for a small wooden cabin in the dark forest, Yeva makes the best of it and hunts down food for her sisters to eat. When her father goes missing, it is she who ventures out into the wintry wood to find him. When she is captured by a Beast and forced to be his prisoner, she never lets herself become helpless. And when she discovers that the Beast is in fact a prisoner himself, she decides it is her duty to save him.
"Yeva, you're no knight from an old story, and he's certainly no maiden in distress."
Beauty and the Beast is a tale as old as time, and our tendency to adapt it is probably just as old. So, if you're going to write a retelling for Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Snow White, or another popular fairy tale, you better be a hundred percent sure you've got something original to present.
And boy, does Hunted deliver.
Set in the snowy woodlands of medieval Russia, Hunted is a wonderfully written novel that takes a story I've heard a million times before, in many different incarnations, and crafts it into something new and fresh. Beauty is the hunter, the Beast is the hunted, and nothing is quite the way I remember it. Lesser known folktales such as, "Vasilisa the Beautiful," and "Ivan, The Firebird, and the Gray Wolf," make an appearance and give a familiar story a whole new flavor. In fact, they were so charming that now I want to learn more about Russian folklore. *Shuffles away to do just that*
Cocktails and Books
Written on Apr 27, 2018
Kait ✨
Written on Jun 8, 2017
Also, there is a dog named Doe-Eyes in this book who is a complete show-stealer. She’s worth reading this book for. :)
limabean74
Written on Apr 29, 2017
Stephanie
Written on Mar 23, 2017
cornerfolds
Written on Mar 6, 2017
Ever since I heard that Meagan Spooner was writing a retelling of my favorite fairy tale, Hunted has been one of my most anticipated reads of 2017! I loved her Starbound Trilogy and knew I would probably adore anything she wrote. Yes, it was incredibly hyped, but how could a Beauty and the Beast retelling not be amazing?
As it turns out, Hunted is a pretty straightforward Beauty and the Beast retelling with a few embellishments to the characters' stories. Yeva is literally called Beauty and the beast is literally called The Beast. He lives in a castle in an enchanted valley in a forest and Yeva stumbles upon it while looking for her father. She is taken prisoner and slowly realizes that there's more to Beast than she first realized. It's almost cut and paste, which I have absolutely no problem with because I love this story!
Although this book is extremely predictable if you are at all familiar with this fairytale, Meagan Spooner has taken it and tweaked it just enough to keep it interesting. I thought that both Yeva and Beast were incredibly interesting characters! I was invested in them and would honestly have loved a little more backstory to Beast.
Now that I've talked about what I enjoyed, let me jump right into my complaints. Hunted is a book in desperate need of a villain. Not only has the villain been removed from the story, but the urgency has too. Without a time limit on the beast's curse, there's not really anything at stake and the book is incredibly slow as a result. Not even Yeva was in any kind of hurry to break the spell and I was bored to tears. It took me WEEKS to get through Hunted, which is incredibly abnormal. The writing also becomes more flowery as the end approaches, making it even more difficult to slog through an already boring story.
The world building was also severely lacking. Beast's valley is enchanted, can only be found if he wants you to find it, and there's a castle at the center. Yeva lives in a village and then in a cabin in the woods. That is the extent of the world building. Someone just informed me that this book was set in Russia and I had absolutely no idea! After the incredible world building in the Starbound Trilogy, I expected way more.
My final huge problem with Hunted is how it takes the tale of Beauty and the Beast and makes it even more creepy than it already was. Sure, we all know that there's a little Stockholm Syndrome happening here and yeah, it's kind of weird for a woman to fall in love with a beast, but it is still a classic and many people find it terribly romantic. In Hunted, Meagan Spooner has likened the relationship to a physically abusive one and it made me feel really skeevy about enjoying the romance. Here's an example taken directly from the text:
Yeva listened in silence, her own thoughts troubled. She'd known other women who'd formed attachments to men who were cruel to them, though she'd never known any in such dire situations. She'd always thought them foolish, weak, lacking in the self-assurance to know they were better than the men whose backhanded compliments made them flush so. But perhaps they were simply in love. Perhaps their hearts had betrayed them, and not their courage.
- ARC pg. 289.
This conversation goes on between Yeva's friend who is voicing her concerns about Yeva's time with the beast, and Yeva who tries to justify his treatment of her with internal dialogue like that quoted above. I mean... I don't know. I'll just let you judge that for yourself.
Hunted had the potential to be incredible - just look at the source material - but it fell way short for me. With the removal of all urgency the story dragged on forever and the romance creeped me out. I also found the ending to be pretty anti-climactic. The only thing I liked about this book was the characters and the parts that were pasted directly from the original. Sadly, this just wasn't for me.
Actual rating: 1.5 stars
shannonmiz
Written on Feb 8, 2017
I just really didn't have strong feelings about this book. Yeva was a fine character, though I didn't feel particularly connected to her. I enjoyed it enough while I was reading, hoping to find out what happened. But I also felt as though I knew what would happen, it felt quite predictable, and maybe that is just because it is a retelling? I am not sure.
The romance was... there. Look, I knew that "Beauty" (Yeva's nickname from her dad) and Beast were going to end up together because... hello, it's the whole original story, right? So I never felt a real sense of urgency there, nor a ton of chemistry. Especially since for a long part of it, he was her captor and I think he wasn't even actually human, so there's that. Val @ The Innocent Smiley did a whole post on the captor-captive relationship in regards to this book, if you're interested in that angle!
I think I was actually more interested in it when she was with her sisters and such, and not so much when she was hanging out alone with Beast, but this could be me missing the point. I did enjoy the Russian part though. That was probably my favorite thing about the book. And that Yeva was a pretty tough MC who was willing to do anything for her family.
Bottom Line: By no means a bad book, just a bit underwhelming for me. Yeva was a strong character, the book was readable enough, I just didn't feel that "something special".
*Copy provided by publisher for review