"I wish just once she would look at me without hate. But wishing is for men. Wanting is what brought us here. Desire and greed are human traits. We are the Beast. And yet . . . I wish."

Hats off to Spooner for writing one of the most beautiful and thought provoking retellings of Beauty and the Beast that I have ever read. Normally, I'm not one for retellings: they entire a cycle of repetitiveness and rarely offer their own uniqueness. There is always some attempted twist at freshness, that it often comes out as wrong or implausible, and just botches it (this couldn't be more true for the latest retelling that I've read - "Reign of Shadows"). In my humble opinion, there have been three exceptions to this rule in regards to Beauty and the Beast: Rosamund Hodge's Cruel Beauty, the A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas, and now, Hunted.

Yeva and her story is just so transcendent, that if it weren't for the nickname Beauty, and the calling of the Beast exactly what he was, I could almost forget that this story is a reprise of that tale as old as time. This story could exist in and of itself, without ties to the fairytales I've come to love. I think one of the many reasons I fell in love with this retelling, comes from the author's acknowledgments, where she addresses that the book is almost autobiographical, because like so many of us, we hunger for something.

The dedication of this book was also quite beautiful.

One other thing that I loved about this story is the *plot twist*. I say it like that because when we were presented with the information that foreshadowed that ending, it didn't immediately click to me. It wasn't until I read the quote above that realisation dawned on me, and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. I normally have an adept reception to foreshadowing, but Spooner blends it in so well, it wasn't a plot twist until an insurmountable amount of evidence was finally presented.