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A review by minomnom
The Beast Within: A Tale of Beauty's Prince by Serena Valentino
1.0
1 star
CN: abusive and manipulative behavior, mentions of death and violence
To be honest, I went into this book without any expectations, but was still pretty intrigued, since I've never considered the Beast as the villain and rather found Gaston fits more into this postition. Well, in this book, the Beast was really a villain and it was no fun reading about it.
The book deals with the prince and how the curse came to be and his slow transformation into a beast. We all know that the prince was shallow and egoistic, but boy oh boy, was he also manipulative and pretty abusive. Well, I could never really get the idea how people could romanticize the Beauty and the Beast movie, anyway. During the days where he was aware of his curse he tried to manipulate a princess to fall in love with him to break the curse. He actually succeeded, but in order to break the curse he also needs to genuinely fall in love with her, which he doesn't, so of course he cannot stop the curse. Instead of being reflective of his actions, he acussed the princess of betraying and lying to him. Fun times.
The whole premise of the Villains series is that three Odd Sisters are actually responsibe for every Disney villains descent into madness and evilness, which could be fun to read, but especially this book felt like a badly written fanfiction with weird self-inserts. Sure, they were included at points which made sense and didn't disturb the overall plot, but I absolutely hated it when they were mentioned. Also, the sisters are supposed to be mad, but they were rather just annoying.
AND WELL THE WHOLE GASTON ORDEAL. In this book, Gaston and the prince were actually best friends before the prince turned into the Beast wtf. Gaston was even pretty sympathetic and gentle and most of his actions were so out of character I couldn't. It was explained that the curse caused the two of them to forget each other (so the whole movie still made sence), which is imo lazy writing, but well.
CN: abusive and manipulative behavior, mentions of death and violence
To be honest, I went into this book without any expectations, but was still pretty intrigued, since I've never considered the Beast as the villain and rather found Gaston fits more into this postition. Well, in this book, the Beast was really a villain and it was no fun reading about it.
The book deals with the prince and how the curse came to be and his slow transformation into a beast. We all know that the prince was shallow and egoistic, but boy oh boy, was he also manipulative and pretty abusive. Well, I could never really get the idea how people could romanticize the Beauty and the Beast movie, anyway. During the days where he was aware of his curse he tried to manipulate a princess to fall in love with him to break the curse. He actually succeeded, but in order to break the curse he also needs to genuinely fall in love with her, which he doesn't, so of course he cannot stop the curse. Instead of being reflective of his actions, he acussed the princess of betraying and lying to him. Fun times.
The whole premise of the Villains series is that three Odd Sisters are actually responsibe for every Disney villains descent into madness and evilness, which could be fun to read, but especially this book felt like a badly written fanfiction with weird self-inserts. Sure, they were included at points which made sense and didn't disturb the overall plot, but I absolutely hated it when they were mentioned. Also, the sisters are supposed to be mad, but they were rather just annoying.
AND WELL THE WHOLE GASTON ORDEAL. In this book, Gaston and the prince were actually best friends before the prince turned into the Beast wtf. Gaston was even pretty sympathetic and gentle and most of his actions were so out of character I couldn't. It was explained that the curse caused the two of them to forget each other (so the whole movie still made sence), which is imo lazy writing, but well.