Beauty’s Curse

Jodi
Woody
Genre: 
Paranormal

Adelaide didn’t love her master, so he put her under a powerful curse to make sure she would forever be twisted and ugly. Many years later, Adelaide lives alone and provides spells to the local people of her village. One day a rich but homely couple comes to her and asks to be beautiful. Adelaide agrees, but in return, they must give up their son. Adelaide raises Nicholas, but he comes to despise her and in her anger she curses him as well. After many centuries the boy’s father, Victor, adopts a scarred young girl and raises her as his own and together they plan to break Nicholas free of his curse by showing him the true meaning of love and beauty.

There are many fascinating characters in the story, and the theme of inner beauty is presented as an interesting and unique take on a classic Beauty and the Beast tale. Unfortunately, the novel contains multiple grammatical and spelling errors, and needs a fair amount of editing. The story arc, while it has the potential to be a sweeping epic, has huge amounts of time condensed into a short book, resulting in choppy, disjointed scenes with no consistently clear main character and an unsteady point of view.  The section where Nicholas and Hope are together is the most cohesive and the reader begins to get a sense of the emotions and relationships of these characters. While the plot outline works well, the overall lack of polish and editing hampers what could be a great twist-on-the-familiar epic fairytale.

 

Stephenia McGee