Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
My rating: 2/5 cats
For one moment, I felt like a river running down to his ocean.
i feel like i need to drop a few lines here about what, precisely, i felt was lacking in this story. i so rarely throw down a fewer-than-three-stars cats rating on here, i figure an explanation may be helpful. i’m not going to go into too much plot-detail, since there are a bazillion reviews of this book already on here – i just want to have a record of my own reaction, for the day when some stranger asks me WHYYYYYYYYYYYY i didn’t like this.
there are a few reasons.
1) i am confused
on paper, the concept of fusing multiple fairytales with classical mythology is exciting and should make for a pleasantly dense story that is at once comfortably familiar but also studded with surprising AHA moments as the overlaps and contrasts begin to manifest. however – there wasn’t a true marriage between the elements here. their presence was more decorative than functional, and while it occasionally meshed well, overall it was just too cluttered. it’s like when you have a really delicious cupcake and it’s already got a tasty frosting on top but then someone thinks “add gummy worms!” and it throws off the texture and the taste and you have to chew SO MUCH you forget about how tasty the cupcake was because you’re so focused on not choking to death.
2) nyx, the heroine of this book and NOT the greek goddess of night (whose name is a bit problematic in a book that incorporates so many other aspects of greek mythology and in which darkness/shadows but not specifically nighttime are a preoccupation) anyway, her. she’s meant to be the sacrifice and savior of her people, trained since she was a little girl in both fighting and magical arts and yet she is not at all a badass heroine. once she gets to the castle, she’s completely directionless, which makes the book directionless. she’s inconsistent, unstable, easily distracted, prone to violent and short-lived outbursts that simmer down into grumbling recriminations directed at multiple targets. it’s emotional whiplash – with her sister, she is loving and resentful, protective and hurtful, with ignifex, she goes from attraction to attempted homicide and back again in the blink of an eye. the inconsistency makes it confusing and difficult to root for her to succeed, because it’s hard to know what “success” would even look like, with all the cross-purposes and competing goals and obstacles.
this book is best categorized as a fantasy romance, but i was completely unmoved by the romance itself. which – yes, is a familiar feeling for me, since i’m not a fan of romances, so i’m an easy target for your accusations of not being the right audience. howevs, even when i read a romance that doesn’t make me swoon or whatever, i can usually understand why it would work for other readers – i can see that the bones (heh) of the relationship are solid and why the two would fall for each other and why readers would cheer. but this one – this is such a perfunctory romance that exists only because we are told it exists. technically it’s a love triangle, and it’s at least an interesting version of a love triangle, but it’s also the worst kind of instalove because it’s unfounded, unearned, and circumstantially selfish.
those are the big three complaints, and all i can muster as a “review” right now. i still really want to read the second book in this standalone series. i think there’s a great story underneath all this clutter and i am really rooting for it to manifest in the second installment. at the very least, i am excited because it’s a love story between a monsterfighting girl and a boy with no hands. which is pretty hot.
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my guess is that some joker broke into my digital copy of this and gleefully altered its contents; transforming it from the amazing, life-changing book everyone is raving about into some half-baked romance featuring a sloppy and confusing mythos-mashup and completely lacking in either emotional tension or a cohesive narrative.
this is either some sort of magic eye puzzle i’m just not equipped to “see” or i have forgotten how to read books.
maybe i’ll review this further tomorrow, or maybe i’ll take a nap.
