Everyone was raving about this book by Sarah J. Maas a few months back and I used part of the Barnes & Noble gift card I got for my birthday to buy it. Then Spinning Starlight came out a couple months ago and I wanted to read it right away, but when I got the chance, I told myself I had to read this book first because I bought it first.
For those of you who don’t know, it’s a YA fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, which is only one of my very favorite fairy tales ever. I know it’s a shallow, sexist story, but I love it anyway. And this version is neither sexist nor shallow.
SPOILER ALERT!
The main character, Feyre, is nineteen years old and struggling to support herself, her two older sisters, and her useless father after he lost his fortune. They live just south of a magical wall that divides the human realm from Prythian, the faery realm, in accordance with a treaty between faeries and humans that was drawn up about five hundred years ago. Prior to that, faeries enslaved humans until the humans rose up in rebellion, leading to a very long, very bloody war that eventually resulted in the treaty and the magical wall. To say relations between humans and faeries is still tense is putting it mildly.
Now there are rumors of faeries somehow making it through the wall and lurking in the forest, making just one more thing Feyre has to be on the lookout for when hunting in the woods to provide for herself and her family. When she spots an unusually large wolf, Feyre suspects it might be a faerie so she kills it, skins it, and sells its hide.
That evening, a faerie that pretty well matches the description of the beast from the Disney movie barges in on Feyre’s home, demanding to know who killed his friend. Feyre admits it was she and he says, according to the treaty, if a human kills a faerie without provocation, the human’s life is forfeit to the faeries. The human can either die or be held captive in Prythian. Feyre doesn’t remember this particular part of the treaty, but she goes with the beast to live out her days with him.
It turns out the beast, Tamlin, is a shapeshifter, so when they get to his manor, he’s taken his normal form, which is that of a gorgeous human with pointy ears (he is a faery after all), gold-brown hair, green eyes, and a gold mask covering the top half of his face. In fact, everyone in Tamlin’s court wears masks permanently covering the top half of their faces. Feyre is told this is due to a blight that struck Tamlin’s court in the middle of a masquerade. It has been leaching the faeries of most of their magic, which is understandably problematic when their land requires magic to thrive.
Of course Tamlin and Feyre fall in love, even though Feyre knows Tamlin isn’t telling her everything. Suffice it to say Feyre ends up finding out the true source of the “blight” that’s been affecting magic in Tamlin’s realm she has to fight to save Tamlin, his kingdom, and her own life. It was a pretty great twist on the enchantress’s curse that you’ll recognize if you grew up with the Disney version. I appreciated the fact that it stayed true to those roots, while creating an entirely different story and character with her own motivations.
Of course I grew up with the Disney version, but I’ve also read the original, so for a while, I wasn’t sure which way Maas was going to go. Things were looking so bad for Tamlin I was afraid this version would take after the original more than the Disney version, but it soon became clear that wasn’t the case. Phew!
I wasn’t entirely sold by the ending though. It seemed like everything got wrapped up a little too neatly and I’m always skeptical of authors that kill off characters, only to bring them back to life. Magic or not, it still feels like cheating.
That’s not to say Feyre gets off easy by any means. She pays dearly for her happy ending, and I do give Maas props for that. She also gets props for writing a great story that was fun to read and full of awesome characters. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
I also appreciated the way this YA book dealt with sex. Feyre and Tamlin do make love and it’s beautiful and loving and all that, but before meeting Tamlin, Feyre had been having casual sex with a boy in her village. She admits she doesn’t love him and doesn’t expect him to love her, but they both need an escape from their miserable lives and they occasionally find that escape in each other. I gotta give props to a YA book that admits that sometimes sex is just sex. It also mentions the importance of birth control for extra brownie points.
What did you guys read this week? Anything that had you on the edge of your seat? I want to hear all about it!
Photo credit: peaceful-jp-scenery / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
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