5/5 stars on Goodreads
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| A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer |
It’s not often that I pick a random book I see an ad for,
read the sample chapters, and like them so much that I purchase the book and
just keep reading. And this even though I knew it’s a retelling of a fairy
tale, which seldom are worth reading. It’s also told in first person present
tense that I don’t really like, with alternating point of view chapters, but I
was able to overlook that too.
A Curse So Dark and Lonely is therefore quite
unique.
A Curse So Dark and Lonely is based on the story of the Beauty and
the Beast, which has been retold so often that one would think there’s no point
in doing it again. But Brigid Kemmerer has only taken the premise from the
original story: a prince with a curse that can only be broken by someone
falling in love with him. Everything else is new.
Rhen, the prince, is perfectly handsome young man for most of
the time. The beast only emerges every three months or so, by which time the
woman brought to his castle for the purpose should’ve fallen in love with him. Why that never happens eludes him.
Once the beast emerges, it rages for a while, killing everyone, and then
everything restarts from the beginning, with the exception of the dead who
remain dead. After hundreds of cycles, Rhen’s stopped wooing women in his own
world. Instead, the women are kidnapped from a parallel reality—our world—to
which his personal guard Grey has been given access by the same enchantress who’s
placed the curse on Rhen.
Harper, the heroine, isn’t the bookish beauty of the
original story. She lives in Washington DC of our reality, and comes from a
broken home: her father has left, leaving the family on the mercy of his
violent debtors that her brother tries to appease, and her mother is dying of
cancer. Most importantly, however, Harper herself isn’t outwardly perfect. She
has cerebral palsy, which in her case affects her mobility, and she has a
pronounced limp.
Harper is accidentally brought into Rhen’s world by Grey,
when she tries to prevent him from kidnapping a new woman. The start isn’t
therefore auspicious. And even after the situation is explained to her, she has
no intention of falling for her kidnapper, which is refreshing. To make the
matters direr, Rhen is told by the enchantress, that this will be his last
season. If he doesn’t find a woman to love him, he’ll remain a beast forever.
Stakes so set against him, Rhen doesn’t even try to woo
Harper. Instead, he allows her to drag him out of his castle where he finds
that his people are suffering and the kingdom is about to be taken over by the
enemy Queen. From then on, the story is fairly traditional fantasy, with the
parallel reality twist and a ticking clock towards the final emergence of the
beast.
I absolutely loved this book. Harper was a wonderful
character, resilient and compassionate, and growing stronger than she’s
believed herself to be. She’s constantly torn between wanting to help Rhen’s
people and returning home to see her mother before she dies. Rhen is less
likeable, calculating and arrogant. It’s never even occurred to him that he
would have to learn to love the women in return for them to fall for him, and
his failures baffle him. But he’s torn by his actions as the beast too, which
make him more sympathetic. As a potential couple, however, the two aren’t
really a good match, and the reader doesn’t have a great hope that the curse
will be broken in time. Rhen’s guard Grey makes a much better romantic hero,
and I at least couldn’t help rooting for him, despite knowing what the stakes
were.
With the enemy army approaching, the story comes to a point.
The ending is satisfying, with a twist that allows the story to continue in the
next book. I’ll definitely be reading that one too. The book is marketed for middle grade and young adult
audiences, but there’s some graphic violence, and I wouldn’t recommend it to
younger readers.
