Cruel Beauty – Rosamund Hodge

Knowing the truth is not always a kindness.

 

Summary
Nyx always knew that she has only one purpose in life – to defeat the monster that rules her kingdom. She has been betrothed to him since the day she was born. And since that day she trained to kill him. Today it’s the day of her seventeenth birthday. It’s time for her to marry her enemy. And it’s time to fulfill her destiny.

Writing
The prose in this book is beautiful. The author uses flowery language and creates very poetic sentences, but at the same time is filled with dialogues that don’t feel overly dramatic. The writing matches the fairlytale-like setting of the story very well.

Characters
Nyx is an amazing lead. She feels a lot of resentment and betrayal that had a long, long time to fester in her heart. At the beginning of the story she fought with that darker part of her, but later on she started to embrace it and it brought me a lot of joy. It’s very rare to find a book with a heroine that has a lot of hatred inside of her. She’s not a bad person, she just has a darker side. This made her character arc incredibly fascinating to observe.

Both Shade and Ignifex are just as interesting. Throughout the story I was never sure of their motives or intentions, which made the story even more engrossing. And the romance is adorable. A little bit too PG-13 for a story like this one, but adorable nonetheless.

Plot
I loved the combination of Beauty and the Best retelling with the Greek mythology. It gave a story, that follows a pretty familiar route, a flare of something extra. I really enjoyed that.

The romance in this book is really important to the plot. It’s also the thing that pushes the story forward, when the action begins to feel a little lackluster. Which unfortunately happens a little bit too often.

What I enjoyed the most about this book was the fact that I was never sure if we are going to get a happy ending or not. This book made me doubt myself a lot. And I liked it

Overall
It’s a very solid, very unique retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It’s a dark and romantic, completely engrossing story with amazing worldbuilding. I really recommend giving it a try.

You can find this book on Goodreads and Book Depository