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Ratings (out of 5)
Chemistry: 💥💥💥💥Heat: 🔥🔥
Enchantment: 🥀🥀🥀🥀
Style: 🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️
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Confession: I was never that into Beauty & The Beast.
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Growing
up, I had the beautiful Marianna and Mercer Mayer story book retelling,
I watched the late 80s TV show with my mom, and I was the right age for
the Disney adaptation. Later, I fell in love with Robin McKinley but
never loved her retellings as much as I loved her books about girls with
swords. I loved the thorns, the roses, the magic but I never loved the
couple. I think part of it was that I could never reconcile myself to a
woman changing a dangerous, bullying, violent man’s heart if only she’s
beautiful and kind and brave enough.
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But then I ran across
Anna Burke’s, Thorn. Here is the fairy tale wrought fresh, sensitive,
stinging with subtle, powerful emotion. In Thorn, the beast is known as
The Huntress, a woman cursed for the carelessness with which she throws
away life. She is an immortal embodiment of the hunt, the winter, the
biting cold. And, riding an enormous bear and followed by a pack of
gigantic wolves, she’s gloriously intimidating. I fell in love.
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But
not instantly. And neither does Thorn’s Beauty, Rowan. Rowan is taken
from her home by The Huntress after her father steals an enchanted rose.
What follows are the quiet efforts of The Huntress to make Rowan
comfortable, to understand this clumsy, awkward, weak woman and how it
is that she isn’t really weak at all. Rowan is brave, intelligent,
thoughtful. And The Huntress and Rowan bond slowly, their love is as
thorny and as beautiful as the roses that surround them. It comes
naturally, little by little, as The Huntress and Rowan give of
themselves to each other. As they understand each other, the beauty and
the beastliness inside both of them.
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With its thoughtful
re-casting and turns of phrase so perfect and subtle they made a
thousand tiny cuts in my heart, I can honestly say l loved Thorn. I
loved it. I will read it again. I will recommend it to friends. It is
what I always wanted Beauty and the Beast to be.
Kiss
& Tell: A few heart melting, earth shattering kisses and touches
are here but the more intimate scenes are fade to black.
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