Review: Beastly by Alex Flinn

I haven't done a book review since, what? march?, but I decided I wanted to do more book reviews and the like because reading is such a major part of my life and not writing about it doesn't really make sense.

I really wanted to read a fairytale retelling, preferably YA because I having such a YA phase at the moment, but had no idea where to start. The main recommendation on goodreads is Ella Enchanted but my sister told me it wasn't good and also I've heard it's more middle school than YA and this is far more complicated than I wanted it to be. I just wanted to read a modern fairytale retelling.

I decided to read Beastly by Alex Flynn which I knew had been made into an Vanessa Hudgens movie three years ago (which wasn't the thing that made me buy the book funnily enough).

Beastly is a YA modern day retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in NYC about Kyle, a wealthy, spoilt, attractive guy who meets a witch in his English class. She curses him and turns him into a "beast," to quote Twisted, "a wolf-bear-thing" and he must make a girl fall in love with him, he must love her in return and they must kiss in two years in order to break the spell.

I really really liked this and it grew on me especially with the introduction of Kyle's blind tutor, Will, the rose garden and the overall mushy-ness of the later chapters. It was warm and fuzzy and I really liked that. The plot twists were well thought out and not obvious when often YA novels lack a good plot twist.

Beauty and the Beast has never been my all-time-favourite fairytale though Disney's Belle has always been the princess I am most like and as a result I feel very protective over the story. The story was very cleverly woven around the original tale. I also really liked the references to books. I loved the symbolism of the roses all the way through out the book and the relationship between good deeds and roses.

There were some niggles I had with the book though, the web chats between different fairytale creatures were a bit annoying and diverged from the plot more than I wanted it to. Also there was very little subtlety with the character development which is a shame because the character development was the main part of the plot and if the little comments could have been left out it would have felt like the author (or her publishing team) was not treating me like an idiot.

I would read this book even if you have seen the movie because I've read the movie plot synopsis (thanks, Wikipedia) and it's not as good as the book. I would also recommend just buying this because the cover is gorgeous.

I would highly recommend this as an introduction to modern day retellings but I would encourage you to know the original story, not just the Disney one (I'm sorry, Disney, I really really love you).

I gave this book four stars as it was really, really good but just not fantastic-excuse-me-the-world-needs-to-read-this-book-no-matter-what.


Film trailer