Cruel beauty

This book was so close to being perfect and then the author shot herself in the foot.

Hodge set up the perfect story about accepting your flaws and seeing your worth and the worth of those you love not just in-spite of but because of those flaws. Then she dropped the ball like she was playing hot potato to moralize at the readers. Hodge leaves us with the message that no one is truly worthy of love, care, or sacrifice but for some inexplicable reason (it is literally never explained) we do these things for each other anyways. Exceptionally Catholic take.

I was actually surprised Lux and Nyx weren't granted forgiveness for their sins at the end but were instead left to live out their wretchedly impious and impure lives.

There was also some lovely conversation around the lesser peasant hedge gods and how these are only for foolish uneducated people. The nobles believe in the True Gods because they are wiser and have science (hermetic teachings). Classism and colonization, who?

This is a truly amazing book. While it's an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, it's unlike any other adaptations of that story I've read. What really made me fall in love with the story is that it went beyond the idea that she just had to see beyond his beastliness to set things right, and it does so in an unexpected way. Add a few surprising turns and you have a tale that honors its source material while being an original in its own right.

The writing is very lush, making the world vivid and almost tactile, and the characters are complex. It takes a certain skill to write a book where the majority of the story only involves three characters and not have it feel like a large, empty house. Because the cast is small, there's room to let the characters breathe and grow - and the relationship blossom - at a nicely measured pace.

This is the first book in a new fictional universe, which will feature additional retelling of fairy tale classics. Already, a novella - Gilded Ashes, a retake on Cinderella - has been published, and it shares many of the strengths that Cruel Beauty possesses, so the series shows some promise off being one to keep an eye on.