Frustrating Heroine on Misguided Journey of Self-Delusion
*This review contains mild SPOILERS*
So to begin, I had great hopes for this book- I love retellings of Beauty & the Beast, and was looking forward to this very different version of the story.
I found this book very frustrating to read, and almost gave up on the book several times because Bella is characterized SO differently from what you would expect from Belle.
To me, Belle has a few qualities that define her character in every retelling. She is intelligent, passionate, loyal to her family and/or friends, a little bit stubborn, and is considered a bit of a misfit as a general rule. She is mostly secure in herself, and doesn’t seek the approval of the masses- she knows herself and what she wants and won’t accept mistreatment from those around her.
While I can understand that this is a YA retelling, and thus the universal experience of trying to find out who you are and where you fit in is a central theme of the genre, I think Bella strayed too far from the key characteristics that Belle is meant to embody.
Bella begins with most of the qualities a reader would expect- Bella is a misfit who has surrounded herself with a few very good friends. She is one of the best students in her class, but is failing French (though, let’s be real here, a 3.8 or 3.9 GPA will no longer grant you Valedictorian or Salutatorian- my graduating class in 2005 had 3 Co-Valedictorians with GPAs of 4.45 because of the extra weight given to AP classes, and a top New York private school WILL be offering, if not requiring, APs). She loves her father and her friends, and goes out of her way to read new things.
But Bella has a long-time crush on Luke, our resident Gaston character, and here we begin to depart from everything you think you know. If Bella were a true Belle, she would see right through Luke from the beginning and want absolutely nothing to do with him, but Bella is taken with his good looks and popularity; though to be fair, she begins to see through him once she has just one conversation with him, she allows herself to be manipulated into his scheme.
And now we begin the snowball of character deterioration. She is a good student who cares about school, but ditches class to go shopping. This girl told us that she hates pink, and yet she gets railroaded by Luke into buying an expensive new wardrobe that seems to be at least half that detested color. She loves her friends, but continues to lie to them and makes little effort to try to include them in her newfound popularity (though presumably, this is BECAUSE she is lying to them, and the less she sees and speaks to them, the less she has to lie).
I found it endlessly frustrating that despite the many times Bella tells herself that she should stop lying and tell the truth, she does nothing but continue to lie. Bella somehow plummets to become a character that is uncertain, vain, grasping for popularity, lying to everyone around her- especially the people she loves and values most, making super unwise and unhealthy decisions, and allowing herself to be a pawn in a game that she is not at all equipped to play. (Not only that, but this is a supposedly intelligent girl, who presumably has a smart phone with a maps application- the fact that she can’t figure out the location of this shady warehouse is just ridiculous.)
The only times I could tolerate Bella were her scenes with Cole- and thank goodness for Cole: his character saves this book single-handedly. Without him, I would have given up on this book 30% in. By about 50% in, I was seriously wondering whether the author intended Bella to actually be the Beast character. The fact that I managed to suffer through this book till the end is a testament to how much I needed to vent about it (I didn’t want to be unfair to Bella if she redeemed herself). But Bella doesn’t truly redeem herself- she is bailed out from her mistakes again and again by others, and while she does begin to understand and go back to being her true self, at the end of the novel all I can say is that Cole is unfailingly loyal and loves her way more than she deserves given how badly she treated him.
I will not be reading any more books in this series, as I cannot even begin to imagine the horrors of how the author will ruin Ariel and Jasmine.