Heather Rose Jones

This is the most creative Beauty and the Beast retelling I have ever read, but if someone is looking for a romance they wouldn’t find much of it here (or at least not in the way we are used to in this kind of story).

The book still has a lot of the elements of the original fairy tale, but transformed. It does start with a man stealing a rose and having to send one of his three daughters, but in this one the Beast has a sister that is slowly transforming into stone and they are part of the fae. There is a manor instead of a castle and the beast hides it from humans and fae using his magic while his sister is using her magic for the unseen servants. There is a rose that keeps changing colour in an attempt to speak and there is Beauty, called Alys in this book, who is an aromantic and asexual main character. Everyday the beast asks Alys if she loves him and if she will marry him and everyday she answers no, “not because he his a beast, but because she is Alys”. There is also the sorcerer who put the curse on both brother and sister as revenge and she is part of the fae. There is a dance and there is a library full of books with mostly nonsense on the inside because the beast made them magically appear and he was more concerned with appearance than the content.

If that didn’t convince you that this is a wonderful and creative take on the usual story, I don’t know what will. There is a side w|w romance, but not involving Alys because Alys is who she is until the end.

The pacing is great, not being too fast or too slow. The chapters are short, which makes me keep reading “just one more”. I liked the characters and I liked the themes of love and recognition of emotional abuse, besides all the creativity that went into this short book.

I definitely recommend it and I figured out that I really like queerness in my fantasy. That is something that I already knew, but I used to think I would still enjoy books without it and it has been harder lately for those to hit the spot for me.… (mehr)

This was my favorite novel of 2014. Frittering away my life watching Rose of Versailles has made me really enjoy stories about female swordfighters. I had modest expectations for this book, which were exponentially exceeded. It’s an incredibly compelling and well-written fantasy novel set in a mythical European country. I think this was some of the best worldbuilding I’ve ever encountered. It’s a world where there’s magic but, very realistically, exactly how the magic works is not that well understood and most people don’t really care because their minds are on other stuff. I thought this novel also dealt very nicely with some common problems in lesbian historical fiction (see, that’s what it read like, even though it was fantasy), such as having a realistic happy ending in a homophobic society, and also dealing with the lovers-pretending-to-be-mistress-and-servant trope. If you are looking for a lesbian Patrick O’Brian-esque fantasy novel, which I would have looked for had I ever dreamed such a thing was possible, this is it. Whatever Heather Rose Jones writes next, I want it.… (mehr)