Beastly

by Alex Flinn

hardcover, 320 pages

HarperTeen, September 2007

ISBN: 978-0060874162

A modern fairy tale. Paranormal romance. A male protagonist. All things that I usually like to read. Unfortunately, Beastly began well and slowly began to deteriorate, and by the end I was not impressed.

In this modern-day version of Beauty and the Beast, we follow Kyle Kingsbury, who is handsome, rich, and a total asshat. When he accidentally pisses off a witch, she curses him with the appearance of a beast. Only if he can find someone to love who will love him in return will he be returned to his former self.

The basic idea is nothing new, but certainly interesting. Modern fairy tales are such a great way to infuse new life in to a story. In this case, I really enjoyed reading about Kyle’s life before the transformation and how he deals with it immediately after. I found the idea of a witch disguised as a high school student amusing and fresh. Once the “beauty” shows up, though, the story starts to become uninspired and bland, and by the close of the novel I was ready to hurl from all the sappy sentimentality (which is not something I’d usually say). As the story wore on, it felt like Flinn ran out of ideas to keep it fresh and fell back on the Disney movie for the bulk of her inspiration.

Kyle begins the story, naturally, as a non-literal beast, and then transforms into an actual one. I liked the reading and how he filled his time in the first half of the book, but later on he started talking and thinking in a more traditional fairy tale way that seemed out 0f character for him. He also mentions this in the text, and if a character mentions that they are speaking strangely, it’s usually a good indicator that the author should change the text. I enjoyed Will, the blind tutor, and his mixture of sarcasm and caring. A little voice inside of me kept thinking that if the novel really wanted to throw a twist to the reader, Will would have been the “beauty” character, but that doesn’t pan out. As for Linda, well, her name means “beauty” in Spanish, so there was a hint of irony there, but otherwise I found her ridiculously bland and one dimensional.

I really enjoyed this book at first, but when the actual fairy tale elements started feeling crammed in I grew tired, and the second half feels less inspired than the first. Not a bad novel, for sure, but I felt disappointed.