A review by mdpenguin
A Terrible Beauty by Nancy Baker

5.0

I got this as part of a Story Bundle and it never really caught my attention until I read Robin McKinley's Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast and surprised myself by liking it. This is, of course, radically different and I honestly didn't expect to enjoy it terribly much but it managed to really grip me. Baker's writing held my attention well and the descriptions were at the same time detailed enough to get a good image of the setting and characters -- something that's actually pretty important to making the story seem realistic enough to suspend my disbelief since it's told mostly through the perspective of a visual artist -- but there was also ample room to let my imagination customize everything from the time to the geography. Unlike McKinley's story, which takes its time even introducing the Beast, it's a single-track from the beginning to the conclusion without much more deviation than is needed for the story to work. I think that what I liked about it wasn't so much the overarching story as the fact that it's almost a long character study of William, the Beauty to Sidonie's Beast. To give his psychological journey life, Baker created a very colorful, though narrow and confining, world for him to live in as he found his way reluctantly from fear to love. I think that a lot of my admiration comes not only from that but from the fact that this was as good as it was while being a vampire romance novel, which is a subgenre that is so easy to dismiss. Perhaps my surprise at its quality enhanced my enjoyment of it to get an extra star or so in my rating, but that doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy it enough to rate it with five stars.