I like "reviewing" books when I am confused by or dislike or am disappointed by them...
I am on a continuing quest to find good retellings of fairy tales. A long, non-consecutive and somewhat haphazard quest, but a quest nonetheless. Combined with my love of movie trailers, this lead me to read Beastly, a modern Beauty and the Beast retelling by Alex Flinn. I heard about a movie a while back and last night saw the trailer with that girl from High School Musical (playing one of those super attractive losers with impossibly perfect hair - you know, like those ones in your high school? uh....) and one of the Olsen twins (I am strangely fascinated by them) and some dude I've never heard of. I did a lot of eye-rolling and so of course I thought I'd give the book a whirl (bless you, digital library books).
I'd have to categorize it as "superfluous". I'm not opposed to retellings that hew close to the original and don't take risks and turn the story on its ear. Fairy tales are usually so slightly written that you can expand rather than alter and that's great. Go ahead and stick to the basics, but you have to give me SOMETHING - use new and interesting language, give us a deeper look into the characters, make us care more somehow. Flinn's writing was technically proficient, I suppose -- I understood her sentences and what she was trying to convey (and there were no grossly overwrought sentences a la Twilight) but I didn't identify with any descriptions or feel moved, amused or impressed by any of her phrases or images. Nothing struck me as beautiful or true or right. As for the characters, I'll give them a solid "meh". I didn't find anyone becoming an interesting, well-developed person that I cared about -- even the beast narrating from first person couldn't interest me much. The witch who cursed him was the most intriguing one I encountered but she barely featured so it just left me wanting more.
The biggest "superfluous" point against it is its setting. She placed the story in modern New York where apparently cool, 15-year old guys still say "Duh" and doctors encountering a strange unknown "disease" would rather just tell a rich boy "Well golly, we're stumped, you'll never be cured so just go home," than continue to work on his case and delve into something brand friggin' new (doctors aren't into that shit). It doesn't suffer for being modern it's just...pointless. I'm honestly not sure why she bothered to knock it forward a few centuries other than she could. She doesn't make much use of even the most obvious modern science/skepticism vs. magic bit (most characters think, "Whoa! Magic? Okay" and are never bothered by it again). The trimming is all modern but it felt heartless -- if she hadn't decorated with a cell phone or a Wii every few pages you'd never even notice it had a specified time period (product placement as literary device?). Extending from this, the one thing that rang completely, frustratingly false in this book was a series of chat transcripts from an online support group for people who have been transformed. The screen names were all cutesy, face-kickingly blatant fairy tale names for the Beast, the Little Mermaid, the Frog Price, and the Bear from Snow White and Rose Red. And the group is moderated by Chris Anderson (LOL...?). [Side note: I will accept the Frog Prince's explanation that he "sneaks up to the castle" to use the internet and the Bear's that there's wireless everywhere these days, "even in the woods", but tell me: where does a mermaid (PRE-humanity switch, mind you) get a computer underwater? Back to the time-period griping.] Supposedly the chat transcripts range from the beast joining the group near the start of his curse to the happy ending and this is the "opportunity" for him to tell the other participants his story -- the bulk of the book. I think the author was aiming for an interesting framework, but to me it was just an obnoxiously cute "hip" way of screaming, "Hey! LOOK! Its modern! R U totally impressed w my cul2ral relevnz?" Rather than making use of modern technology and socialization in the story itself she slapped (in my estimation) some modern trim on and called it current. I actually found the "sassy" chat transcripts so jarring from the beast's otherwise gentle narration and so unecessary that I just skipped them as I went along.
Overall I wouldn't recommend this book - I wouldn't NOT recommend it, though. Let's just say that while I didn't get much out of it, I won't be filing a complaint with the universe to get back those few hours of my life.
If you want to read Beauty and the Beast from his point of view I would much rather recommend Beast by Donna Jo Napoli - now THAT lady has a knack for keeping the basic plot while giving it a swift kick to make it feel shiny new, completely steeped in its time-period and emotionally relevant. (While you're at it, go ahead and also read The Magic Circle, her lovely and utterly heart-breaking version of Hansel and Gretel. Yes, Hansel and Gretel.)
