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 picked this book because it was the highest rated of this series and Beauty and the Beast is one of my faves. This story is similar to canon, though definitely diverges and heads towards an alternate ending. It was way too long; four hours in, I realized that the book was four hours too long. A major focus of the story was Belle learning about how complicated her mother was, but I didn’t feel like any of the other characters had greater depth than the original movie gives. The past storyline was interesting. Check the trigger warnings because there’s some dark stuff going on. Overall, I am not sure I enjoyed the reading of this book, and I don’t see myself reading the others unless they are much shorter.

If you’ve ever watched Beauty and the Beast and thought it needed more Holocaust, this book is for you! Add in a dash of getting all the flashbacks up front so when Belle finds clues to the mystery, there is nothing to wonder because we already read what happened 100 pages ago - plus so many typos - and you’ve got yourself a hot mess of Disney torture fetish!

For example, I never thought I’d read about

an asylum orderly calmly explain to Belle that she can either do as she’s told, or he can beat the soles of her feet so hard that she urinates herself in pain and will leave no bruises and no one will believe her anyway because she’s in an asylum.

So, yikes.

The ending is a bit of a bummer, it still has a lot of creativity, and it addresses the hiccups in a more fascinating fashion.