I could not put this book down. Braswell's retelling is one of the best ones I've read yet.

Not only does she incorporate the Disney movie so seamlessly that you can practically see the specific scenes playing in front of you and hear the original voice actors speaking the lines, she also gives us an amazing backstory. We see how Belle's parents met and fell in love, the events that led up to the young Prince being cursed, and how Belle goes about breaking it. Braswell jumps back and forth through fairytale history to weave this twisted, enchanting tale As Old as Time.

I've been waiting a while to read this one... 'Beauty and the Beast' retellings are right up there for me alongside 'Hades and Persephone' ones. And as this is the official twist on the tale, I had high hopes! Sadly however, they weren't quite as fulfilled as I'd hoped.

Firstly, I do love the premise that Belle's mother is the Enchantress. It adds a whole other layer to the canon version of the story, but the retelling goes into far more depth, giving you a proper backstory for Maurice and Rosalind. Though it's not hugely detailed, the worldbuilding really enhances the experience, giving explanations and justification for the Enchantress' actions. This makes it so much better than the brief retelling of a Christian parable that the original tale includes with no real context. I enjoyed the focus this whole portion of the story relieved, and the dual tineline shifts between Rosalind and Belle's stories really worked for me.

Unfortunately, I didn't find a lot else to rave about. Apart from the ending, Belle's story broadly follows the canon version of events, so there is very little that jumps out at you. Even the 'big' changes don't feel like they have much if an impact to the overall tale. I think the sweetest bit is Belle trying to teach the Beast to cook, but yeah, there aren't a great number of meaningful revisions, which makes the whole thing fall a bit flat.

Likewise, basically everyone you recognise feels totally out of character. The Beast is just a petulant teenager rather than an ugly soul turned good by the power of love. Gaston is a soft, bumbling idiot more often than not (although he does have an inkling of the mean streak). Even Belle just doesn't chime with her movie counterpart - somehow she's harder, and perhaps more modern feeling. The lack of familiarity made it so much harder sink in and enjoy. I also wasn't hugely impressed with the replacement villain of the piece. It felt a bit pointless when  you already have such a good villain in Gaston that you could use, and while it wasn't hard to follow why things turned out the way they did, it doesn't make for the most thrilling villain arc.

Generally speaking, the writing and layout us quite patchy in places - there are certain a few typos in my copy, and several instruments where a character is experiencing a flashback or memory, but there is nothing to separate it from the main text - you only realise you're looking into their mind when you're half way down the page and it suddenly dawns on you why you're suddenly reading about a different setting! 

This is my third Twisted Tales, and so far they've been average at best. However, the ones I've read have all been by this author. I have two more on my TBR shelf, both by different authors, so I will.give those a go at some point to see if it's a series problem, or an author problem for me.

Quite dark overall, but very well written with lots of changes to the Disney movie. But all good changes, in the long run. The characters already mean so much that I already felt connected to them from the jump. The additions were very interesting.

I had been questioning if I would even enjoy this book, due to putting it off for so long I believed it would seem childish and boring to me. This was not at all the case. The story is so unlike the original, so entirely unique, it's amazingly thought through.

I think, in this series/collection at least, Braswell is at her best when she cleaves a little closer to the original tales, giving them twists instead of full reimaginings, though I still liked this addition to the Disney B&tB canon. Going into the backstory of Maurice and the Enchantress who cursed the Beast/Adam was interesting, especially in that it acted as a critique of bigotry against People Who Are Different (god, if les charmantes weren't an allegory for queer, neurodivergent folks by way of changelings/western European fairy lore, I'll eat my hat) and how that leads to oppression, which leads to Bad Outcomes for Literally Everyone. Really, the story felt divided between the present of Belle trying to fix the Beast's curse and the backstory of her parents living through a magical creature genocide, culminating in an eventual blending of the two stories. 

I think I struggled a little with being given a primary villain who wasn't the same as the one from the original Disney canon, since a lot more heavy lifting needed to be done to make him as sinister and insidious as Gaston was in the original film, and I don't feel it was done to good effect. He was awful, and his

magic removing experiments were disgusting and reminiscent of other totalitarian, genocidal regimes

, but maybe that was a little too on the nose and not spread through the narrative enough to feel earned when it happened. I also don't love the idea that the biggest bigots are actually people who are Different and full of self-hatred. The biggest racists are not PoC. The biggest homophobes and transphobes are cis and het. It's a gross move, and one used WAY too often for my taste, to make an oppressed person be the agent by which others are oppressed. 

I enjoyed that Adam and Belle's relationship actually developed on page instead of via montage, and that Adam demonstrated actual growth re: selflessness when he asked Belle's mother to

use the last of her magic to save his castle servants/staff instead of turning him human. Beastly Beast is hotter anyway, and I honestly feel like Belle's better off NOT searching for a "cure" to what's not a problem (this is a joke ONLY if Adam really really REALLY wants to be human and being a Beast bothers him)

. I ALSO like that Belle very much calls out the Enchantress for cursing a grieving, orphaned child as harshly as if he were a fully grown adult man who understood what he was doing and had context for a life that wasn't as pampered as Adam was. That's an important callout! Another delicious piece of book candy down, another tribute to the desire for nostalgia my heart demands.