The Beasts Heart

Our Review

The Beast’s Heart by Leife Shellcross has been added to a growing number of books I was unable to finish. I love the story of Beauty and The Beast and I love retellings of any fairy tale, so this should have been a book I would love. Unfortunately, it was a disappointing read.

The Beast’s Heart is a retelling of Beauty and The Beast from the perspective of the Beast. The Beast is not fully a man or a Beast but some mixture of both since being cursed by a Fairy a long time ago.

Then he met Isabeau and began to feel more human than he had in a long time, but now there is a chance he may lose her, and he needs to act fast.

The first paragraph of The Beast’s Heart was promising and made me feel like maybe this book would live up to my expectations.

“Enchantments and dreams: I expect they are made of the same stuff. They each beguile the mind and confuse the senses with wonder and strangeness so all that was familiar becomes freakish and the most bizarre of things intimate and natural. For the longest time after the curse fell I did not know if I was a beast who dreamed of being a man, or a man who dreamed he was a beast.”

Unfortunately, the rest of the book I read did not live up to my expectations. I only made it to 6% of the way through because I became bored. A lot of the language used to describe things was superfluous and nothing really seemed to happen in many of the passages.

One of the many passages where this was the case was this:

“the real is indistinguishable from the phantasm. My initial flight in abject terror from my home is as sharp and shapeless as a shard of glass.”

During the small amount of The Beast’s Heart I read the Beast talks of time spent in the forest by his home terrorizing creatures and people until one night some new and unfamiliar magic brought him back to his ancestral home.

Once he is home he feels that someone is taking care of him with the use of magic and he begins to regain some of his humanity but the person or persons looking after him remain invisible and he is incredibly lonely and misses human companionship.

Then one day a strange man wanders into his home and the Beast finally has someone to talk to if he can manage to control his animal nature.

This was the point at which I stopped reading because it seemed like it took years to get to this point and I decided I really didn’t care what happened in the rest of The Beast’s Heart.

Our Final Rating...

Mon, 2nd April 2018