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.

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.

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. 

A Twisted Tale story is always a fun read. With this twisted tale I loved the dual POV that we got with the story. How the lore was laid out for us and we got to see how everything got to the point that it did in the story.
I thought how everything was done with the history was impeccable and had me hooked from the start to the finish. I loved how this twist played out, and enjoyed how satisfying it was to finish.

I've been a Beauty and the Beast fan for years. I think I wore out a VHS tape of the Disney version, and oh, that library! So when I learned that there was a "twisted tale" version, I quickly added it to my TBR list. 

It's an interesting "what if?" and it relies very heavily on the reader's knowledge of the Disney version of the tale, which is far far older than even the Perrault version. This reliance on the reader's knowledge is a drawback, as someone who is casually aware of the story would not be able to understand what is going on in this version, or be able to read other of these "twisted tales" without a thorough understanding of the Disney version of the story. 

 On to the story. The first half plays out almost exactly like the Disney movie, though with a lot of backstory about Belle's mother. The chapters alternate between Belle and Maurice in the present time, and Maurice and Belle's mother in the past, with nothing to differentiate the time periods, which is a major drawback, and I almost stopped reading when I couldn't figure out *when* the chapter was taking place. The book goes into detail about what the kingdom was like before the prince was cursed, but more specifically, *why* the enchantress felt it necessary to curse the Prince. Very interesting. 

The story got much more interesting and intense when Belle finds the rose. As the daughter of the enchantress who set the spell, Belle's accidental touch destroys the rose, dooming the Beast and everyone who was caught in the spell to a life of being enchanted household items. The next sections detail their attempts to research how the curse came into being, who placed the curse and why, and how to break it.