Review: Cruel Beauty

CRUEL BEAUTY
Rosamund Hodge
Paranormal Young Adult
352 pages
Balzer + Bray
Available January 28th
Source: ARC from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
Since birth, Nyx has been betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom-all because of a foolish bargain struck by her father. And since birth, she has been in training to kill him.

With no choice but to fulfill her duty, Nyx resents her family for never trying to save her and hates herself for wanting to escape her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, Nyx abandons everything she's ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, destroy his enchanted castle, and break the nine-hundred-year-old curse he put on her people.

But Ignifex is not at all what Nyx expected. The strangely charming lord beguiles her, and his castle-a shifting maze of magical rooms-enthralls her.

As Nyx searches for a way to free her homeland by uncovering Ignifex's secrets, she finds herself unwillingly drawn to him. Even if she could bring herself to love her sworn enemy, how can she refuse her duty to kill him? With time running out, Nyx must decide what is more important: the future of her kingdom, or the man she was never supposed to love.

MY THOUGHTS
Every page of Cruel Beauty lives up to its title, painting gorgeous images in our minds that encourage us to stare blatantly so captivated are we by what we see, but much as the rose that graces its cover, that beauty is not without thorns, and the deeper we journey into this story the more cuts and scratches we bear. The characters in this tale could never be described as likable; likable is far too bland a term for the Gentle Lord, his shadow, and his sacrificial wife. They are quite simply magnetic, drawing us to them with no promise we'll like what we see when we get close, but therein lies part of the appeal: The possibility that what's waiting for us at close range could either win us over completely or drive us away forever. They take the uglier parts of human nature and reflect them back at us unflinchingly, but just when we think they'll stride boldly across the line that will make them irredeemable, they take an enormous step back, casting a smug look over their shoulders in triumph at having led us to believe we'd finally reached the point at which our emotional response to them would become fixed rather than fluctuating.

It's apparent from the very beginning that Nyx is no Belle–no paragon of sweetness and light who charms everyone who crosses her path–instead we get a very angry young woman, caught up in a painful cycle of resentment and remorse as she struggles to make peace with the die her father cast for her. She is not so hateful as to be someone who pushes us away from the first page though, rather she sweeps us up in her beautiful storm of emotions and we don't find our footing again until well after we've closed the back cover. She both gets hurt and inflicts pain, provides comfort and rips it away, and finds love in one breath before betraying it the next, ensuring we dance a bruising jig in trying to keep up with her and the infinitely intriguing house of shadows and secrets she now calls home.

The Gentle Lord and his simultaneously obedient and defiant shadow–separate but inexorably linked entities–are as darkly complex as Nyx herself, daring us one chapter after the next to solve their seemingly unending riddles. They are striking illustrations with captions in an indecipherable language, forcing us at any one point to work with only half the information we need to figure them out completely, eyes open and searching for any clues every action or inaction might provide. Both play Nyx's heart to drastically different tunes, and while the presence of a romantic relationship divided into thirds is often something akin to nails on a chalkboard, in this case it is a dark symphony of discordant notes inexplicably blended together to make haunting and utterly memorable music.

Overall, Cruel Beauty is an unusual and twisted tale, pieces of the classic Beauty and the Beast fairytale combining with threads of Greek mythology to give us a story where love both saves and destroys in equal measure, leaving us wondering up to the very last page how things will end for our wickedly intriguing characters.

Rating: 4/5
 

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This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.