Cruel Beauty (Cruel Beauty)

by Rosamund Hodge

[paperbackjedi]

I should start by saying that I really, really, really wanted to love this book. I love the story of Beauty and the Beast and this book is a fantasy retelling of it so I should have been sold. That being said, the book was… okay. Just plain okay.

Dutiful daughter Nyx has been raised to slay the mysterious, evil ruler of her kingdom since she was little. The only problem is that she’s gotta marry the dude to do it. She grows up resenting her family for bargaining her life away, but is determined to carry out her destiny either way, if only to save her little sister from the same fate. But Ignifex (yes, that’s his name) turns out to be more than she bargained for and she wonders if he’s actually really evil at all as she begins to fall under his spell.

The most interesting part of this book is the mythology. It’s a very cool world she lives in with gods and monsters and various deities. Ignifex himself has a very intriguing title and role to play and I was a fan of his position in the story. Myx lives in Ignifiex’s magical transforming house while trying to unlock its secrets and it’s by far my favorite part of the book. The way the house is described, all the different rooms and parts and magic, is amazing fodder for the imagination. The descriptions are lush and inventive and I thought Hodge did a great job painting a good picture of the world Nyx lives in.

As far as the characters go, I didn’t really fall in love with any of them. As a heroine, Nyx is your standard fare. She’s tough, bitter, and resilient. But she’s also wishy-washy. She spends a lot of time bemoaning her fate and waffling between hating Ignifex and wanting to make out with him, which usually works for me, but in this case comes off as a flaw in her character. She changes her mind a lot over the course of the pages and I got the feeling that she wasn’t fully fleshed out. She was given a relatively complex lot in life, but her character lacks the nuance to make me care about it. This is odd because Hodge does such a good job with the world building, but it doesn’t translate to the characters. Even Ignifex, while charming I suppose, is shrouded in too much mystery and we know very little about how he feels or what he thinks.

I usually love books for their characters and the relationships those characters have. I didn’t really follow the build up of the romance between Ignifex and Nyx. Probably because we knew so little of him and because she seemed to be so poorly constructed. I wanted to connect to them a bit more. However, I found Nyx relationship with her family very interesting and a more compelling angle of the novel. The pull between duty and desire, respect and resentment, and the complicated nature of her family dynamic was very well done. Overall, I loved the idea of this book more than I loved the actual book.

Hodge is going to continue journeying into other fairy tales with Crimson Bound which will take on Red Riding Hood this coming May. Hopefully, I’ll like that one better.