Hunted

by Meagan Spooner

[Kat @ Novels & Waffles]

“The prince's curse wasn't arrogance or cruelty, as it was so often in fairy tales. His curse was wanting, always wanting. And so was Yeva's.”

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*