Will the princess save the beast?
For Princess Jaya Rao, nothing is more important than family. When the loathsome Emerson clan steps up their centuries-old feud to target Jaya’s little sister, nothing will keep Jaya from exacting her revenge. Then Jaya finds out she’ll be attending the same elite boarding school as Grey Emerson, and it feels like the opportunity of a lifetime. She knows what she must do: Make Grey fall in love with her and break his heart. But much to Jaya’s annoyance, Grey’s brooding demeanor and lupine blue eyes have drawn her in. There’s simply no way she and her sworn enemy could find their fairy-tale ending…right?
His Lordship Grey Emerson is a misanthrope. Thanks to an ancient curse by a Rao matriarch, Grey knows he’s doomed once he turns eighteen. Sequestered away in the mountains at St. Rosetta’s International Academy, he’s lived an isolated existence—until Jaya Rao bursts into his life, but he can't shake the feeling that she’s hiding something. Something that might just have to do with the rose-shaped ruby pendant around her neck…
As the stars conspire to keep them apart, Jaya and Grey grapple with questions of love, loyalty, and whether it’s possible to write your own happy ending.
The first of this year's 25 Reads of December from RivetedLit, I thought a Beauty and the Beast style romance sounded cute. While I'm not new to reinterpretations of fairytales/literature classics, B&tB wasn't one I'd picked up yet, plus I'm always excited for a good transformation and/or redemption story. And since time is kinda crunched with these book-a-day offers, I decided to get the audiobook from my library to read along with, so I'll include my Audiobook Addendum section at the end as well.
Before we get too much further into the review, I'm going to make the assumption that you are familiar with Beauty and the Beast's general story and ending. (The Disney version is actually preferred here.) If you're not, consider this a spoiler warning because I don't know that I'm capable of analyzing the interpretation without touching on all aspects of the story, especially the ending. I will, however, do my best to keep unique aspects of the story, the subplots and secondary characters' arcs spoiler-free. So with that said, let's dive in, shall we?
Jaya was an interesting Beauty. Intelligent, politically savvy, athletic (archery), loyal, and strong-willed, she definitely fits the mold of what we'd consider a modern interpretation of Beauty. But she's also got a dark side to her. Revenge is her first priority when she arrives on campus, and her plan for obtaining it involves lying, seduction, and heartbreak. Granted, once she learns that her target is innocent of the crime, she does abandon her scheme, even flipping to feeling genuine affection for him, but Jaya was down for inflicting emotional manipulation and torture for a good portion of the story. Pretty hardcore, no?
I think what I liked most about Jaya was how relatably flawed she was. Just because she was a princess didn't mean she was put on some pedestal. She was smart, but she wasn't smarter than anyone else. She liked books, but that wasn't that unique at a prestigious academy. I think her strongest trait may have been her diplomacy, as she did possess a silver tongue at times, especially when dealing with the Queen Bee character, Caterina. But just because she knew how to act in public, and how to speak civilly, didn't mean she always did the right thing. She definitely made mistakes when it came to acting on loyalty, whether it was on behalf of her sister's sullied reputation against Grey, or other situations where she's unable to prioritize correctly. Instead of just "learning to love the Beast", which placed the emphasis on entering a relationship, Jaya's journey is to learn to love herself and prioritize herself above just her duties or her loyalties. Not to say that one should be selfish, but being selfless is also harmful in its own way. And boy, can I relate.
Grey's story is similarly flipped toward discovering himself, but he's coming from a completely different situation. It's not that he necessarily sees himself as needing to fulfill a duty, unless that duty is dying on his 18th birthday. He's been told ever since he was a kid that he was responsible for his mother's death. Even though the family was cursed due to the actions of an ancestor, the fulfillment of the curse means that his very existence is the fault. Figure that one out. So yeah, he's been treated like shit by his family since (at least) age 6 when he was first shipped off to St. Rosetta's Academy and so he doesn't really have any incentive to put himself out there, to befriend anyone, let alone to love them. Even his friends seem to consider him more of a charity case than an actual friend.
I actually would have liked to see Grey explored more. He's known he's going to die for nearly five years, and is convinced of the curse being the absolute truth, so why is he actually still trying? What does he enjoy? He seems to enjoy reading, but we only get two scenes/conversations with him and books, and other than his reading preferences including historical non-fiction, we don't really get much in the psychology of it. His psychology. We know he doesn't like people, doesn't see the point in getting to know people since he's going to die anyway (or thinks the curse will push them away). But what does he actually enjoy? Why does he keep going to classes? Are the three people who claim to be his friends really enough to keep him going? Keep him sane? Even with all the emotional turmoil he's already been dealt? Maybe I'm being a bit melodramatic, but why isn't this kid in therapy?!
But putting his somewhat shallow interpretation aside for the moment, I did like how his story resolved. Like Jaya, Grey's story came to a head when he had to decide what was most important to him: abiding by what his family had told him all his life, that he was cursed, worth no effort to set things right (like I said, the family knew what it did wrong and could have tried to fix it, but chose not to); or deciding that he was worth something, worth love and respect, and taking it upon himself to change things for him. His story was less learning to love another, as it is in other versions of the tale, and more learning to accept love, choose love for himself. Which is a great message, so much so that I don't mind it being repeated for both parties of the romance.
So yeah, with so much of the characters' internal journeys revolving around love, what about their romance with each other? Well, it's part Romeo & Juliet, and part Pride & Prejudice with the enemies to lovers storylines, but most of that wraps up by around the halfway point. Once Operation Heartbreak is cancelled on account of the characters actually talking to each other, their relationship actually develops fairly easily. That is, until their own internal conflicts concerning self-love take a front seat and push the drama up to eleven. On the one hand, you'd think that after the last huge communication between them cleared everything up so much, they'd see that further communication would probably be the best option, but as I mentioned before, Jaya is easily blinded by her loyalty to others, so I can understand why the drama escalated the way it did.
Which brings us to a much-too-quick ending. Much like the Disney version, once the major crisis was averted everything wrapped up in just one chapter. I really wanted to see more of the fallout, especially concerning Jaya's family/ruling and the secondary characters in general. There was all this build-up concerning Daphne Elizabeth and Caterina's drama, and even a couple of the other friends' romance arcs, but then everything's just left hanging when Jaya's drama supersedes theirs and we get no resolution to them. I get the desire for Happily Ever After in a romance, but after the story went to great lengths to set up its political setting, I'd have liked a little more detail of how the Happily Ever After actually occurred.
Overall, this might sound a bit out of left field, but I found this story cute and quaint. It seemed to want to be bigger than it was, setting up this whole complex modern background for the characters, but then not putting in the complexity in regards to the ramifications of said background (e.g. Grey's mental state from his assumed terminal diagnosis and prolonged self-hatred). Still, the story had some great side characters who had their own arcs that directly related to our main couple, and the general retelling of the classic tale was fun to read at the time. It was really only upon reflection and writing this review that I realized what all I was missing. So, if you're looking for a Beauty and the Beast retelling with some modern flair, a YA romance that isn't afraid of a few F-bombs, or a love story that focuses on the importance of both the individuals and the couple, then give this one a try.
Read by Shiromi Arserio & Jason Carpenter
Unabridged Length: 10.8 Hours
Listened at 1.5x Speed
Unabridged Length: 10.8 Hours
Listened at 1.5x Speed
Utilizing separate narrators for Jaya and Grey's sections definitely worked to this book's benefit, with each reader bringing their own strengths to the table. Jaya's reader had a slight majority, so it was really important to capture her voice and emotions effectively, which I thought Shiromi accomplished very well. The side characters, specifically a couple of their accents, weren't as strong in her sections, but that was easy to overlook for me. Grey's reader, on the other hand, didn't seem nearly as convincing with Grey's voice or emotions, but nailed more of the accents (particularly Leo's) so I enjoyed the dialog sections from him a bit more. I'm sure Jason Carpenter is a fine narrator, I just thought he sounded too old and unaffected for the character.
On a formatting note, I don't think they needed to read the book exactly as it was written. Whenever the POV switches (which is multiple times per chapter), the new section has the character's name as a header. This is a fine distinction in the book, since it does help to make the text more searchable. But since each character had a different reader, and the section often started with the character's name anyway, more often than not I'd hear, "Jaya. Jaya stared at him..." or, "Grey. Grey walked into the lodge..." Did we really need to hear their names every time their narration started? You'd think we'd understand after the voices switched the first time.
There were also a couple emails that I thought could have been edited down slightly, just so you didn't have to read the full To: and From: addresses and subject line, but they were few enough that it wasn't a deal-breaker. Same goes for text conversations, since the readers used the character voices/accents for each party anyway.
Overall, I thought the voice work really enhanced the experience, even if I thought there could be a little bit of editing done to the audio production. I always prefer full-cast recordings, but these two narrators both did a great job with varying the voices and accents in dialog sections, so it was always easy to follow along with who said what. I did have to read a little slower than normal due mainly to the accents, but this was admittedly a Me-problem, since very few tend to listen with the text in front of them. So if the book sounds like something you're interested in, the audio is definitely a good way to experience it.
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