Beauty, A Kiss in Time

Beauty ~ 247 Pages

“Most of these books haven’t been written yet.” I looked at him stupidly, Kim still in my hand. “But don’t worry, they will be.” He said.

Both of the books I read this weekend were retellings of fairytales. Beauty is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I’ve read quite a bit of these kinds of books, and while I do enjoy them and the creativity, it’s always kind of uninteresting to me in a way another book wouldn’t be because I know how the story goes. So I don’t only know the ending, I know the whole story.

I read another retelling of Beauty and the Beast about a year and a half ago titled Beastly. I know it was recently released as a movie (which I haven’t seen yet, but heard it’s not very good) but I think anyone who likes the Beauty and the Beast story should read that one too. I’ll tell you why I liked that one more. First, I really liked that Beastly was from the Beast’s point of view instead of the overused Beauty’s. Second, it takes place in our time, so it’s not exactly the same as the fairy tale, and lastly, because there’s more dialogue and interaction between the characters in Beastly.

I love descriptions as much as the next person, but at the end of the book I felt as if I knew more about the castle than the Beast. Not to mention that you don’t even meet the Beast until page 114, and in a book that’s only 247 pages long, that’s a large portion of the book. Now, I don’t think I would have minded this much at all if the ending hadn’t been kinda, well… crappy. Beauty saves Beast from “dying “and the story ends all in 12 pages. It took 15 pages to describe the room she was staying in. (I’m not exaggerating, I counted.) Not to mention, she “saved” him by saying, “Wake up my love.” And that was that.

I’m not saying it was bad. I enjoyed it, I really did. I just wanted something… more climactic. I guess it is supposed to be a children’s book. When I finished Beauty, I had 8,736 pages left.

A Kiss in Time ~ 371 pages

"They’re talking about books. My mother loves to talk about books, but Talia’s so old that she wouldn’t have read most of the books Mom knows. The King James Bible was a new book in Talia’s time!"

A Kiss in Time is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, and it’s actually by the same author that wrote Beastly. It tells what would happen if Sleeping Beauty was woken up in our times.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Sleeping Beauty, and since reading Beastly and seeing that the author rewrote SL, I’ve wanted to read this book. I wasn’t let down. I really enjoyed this book, and it kind of reminded me of the movie Enchanted. When the princess (Talia) is woken and (spoiler alert) runs of with the boy who saved her (Jack), she enters our world after being asleep for three hundred years. Naturally, everything is foreign to her. The scenes where she has no idea what’s going on are some of my favorites.

It’s a quick easy read and I read it in one day. It’s a fun book if you like retellings. It switches back and forth between Talia’s and Jack’s points of view, making it more interesting to read. It’s also 371 pages, which leaves me with 8,365 pages to go.

I actually read Beauty while I was a Lake Powell for three days. But since I knew I would finish it, (and the books I put on hold at the library weren’t there yet) I took Inkspell. Inkspell is 635 pages, and I read a little over fifty pages while I was there, but I don’t know if I’m going to finish it. I hope to, but if I don’t get to it, I’ll add those pages on later. For now, I have another book while waiting for two at the library. (I’m now in 259^th place for City of Fallen Angels)

Read On,

Jamie