THE BEAST AND THE BETHANY

A droll tween take on The Picture of Dorian Gray.

For more than five centuries, the superficially polite Ebenezer Tweezer has resided in an enormous house teeming with riches provided by an attic-dwelling beast. Their arrangement is simple: Ebenezer feeds the beast whatever it requests, and the beast vomits forth anything Ebenezer desires. What began with roast beef sandwiches soon gave way to more…unconventional fare, and the beast has vowed to withhold Ebenezer’s 512th birthday present—an annual anti-aging potion—until it’s served a human child. Following a few false starts, Ebenezer visits the contemptible Miss Fizzlewick’s orphanage and adds Bethany, a churlish girl whose parents perished in a fire, to the beast’s menu. Bethany’s surly, sarcastic antics immediately make Ebenezer’s life less than pleasurable, but the beast refuses to sup upon a scrawny child. Straightforward, third-person narration from Ebenezer’s perspective neither preaches nor condescends, and a tight focus on titular characters makes pages fly by. As Ebenezer grows decrepit and battles a will demented as his own, he finds himself growing involuntarily fond of the girl he’s fattening. Can this unlikely tandem outwit a truly inhuman monster? Meggitt-Phillips’ ability to make readers squeal with delight, squirm in discomfort, and squawk with laughter make classical comparisons inevitable. Though wildly imaginative, the book is also ethnically homogenous, as nearly all characters are coded White.

Bound to whet appetites.