Readers who love Beauty and the Beast will greatly enjoy the opportunity to spend more time with their story.
Beauty and the Beast are back, along with the familiar cast of characters from Disney’s films.
This movie tie-in begins not long after Belle’s visit to the forbidden West Wing and the Beast’s subsequent, apologetic gift of the castle’s library, where Belle finds a book that captivates her as no other book has before. The enchanted book Belle loves, Nevermore, allows her to escape the castle and her imprisonment, but it is not all that it seems, and Belle finds herself the unwitting pawn in a game between Love and Death. While in Nevermore, Belle wishes to study at university, an unlikely aspiration in the book’s fictional preindustrial time frame, which may jar readers attuned to such details out of Donnelly’s fantasy world. Within that limitation, this book still works for its audience. Readers will enjoy revisiting this magical world, where they can delve deeper into Belle and the Beast’s relationship, and the adventurous Belle is a likable companion for these enchanted travels in Nevermore. Fans will also be cheered by the funny, heartwarming banter among the castle’s enchanted servants. Like Belle, many readers may wish to escape their imperfect lives, and they might find bracing Belle’s discovery that real life is to be preferred, for all of the chaos and pain that it brings.
Readers who love Beauty and the Beast will greatly enjoy the opportunity to spend more time with their story. (Fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4847-8098-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Disney Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2017
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end.
Riggs spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs.
The brutal murder of his grandfather and a glimpse of a man with a mouth full of tentacles prompts months of nightmares and psychotherapy for 15-year-old Jacob, followed by a visit to a remote Welsh island where, his grandfather had always claimed, there lived children who could fly, lift boulders and display like weird abilities. The stories turn out to be true—but Jacob discovers that he has unwittingly exposed the sheltered “peculiar spirits” (of which he turns out to be one) and their werefalcon protector to a murderous hollowgast and its shape-changing servant wight. The interspersed photographs—gathered at flea markets and from collectors—nearly all seem to have been created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and generally feature stone-faced figures, mostly children, in inscrutable costumes and situations. They are seen floating in the air, posing with a disreputable-looking Santa, covered in bees, dressed in rags and kneeling on a bomb, among other surreal images. Though Jacob’s overdeveloped back story gives the tale a slow start, the pictures add an eldritch element from the early going, and along with creepy bad guys, the author tucks in suspenseful chases and splashes of gore as he goes. He also whirls a major storm, flying bullets and a time loop into a wild climax that leaves Jacob poised for the sequel.
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end. (Horror/fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59474-476-1
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
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