"Enchantments and dreams"!

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The Beast's Heart by Leife Shallcross  
    
My first impression was of the rich descriptive language that peppered this magical story. The opening few paragraphs set up the tone and Shallcross's word smithing is riveting. I loved it!
Beast's description of the curse brings his nightmare alive for us, where the "real is indistinguishable from the phantasm...Living under such an enchantment is akin to being trapped in the grip of a restless slumber, fighting toward wakefulness and finding only dreams locked within dreams."
Magical with a capital "M" this story indeed is. Told mostly from the Beast's point of view this reimagining of Beauty and the Beast set in seventeenth century France is both a nightmare, a romantic gothic fairy tale, and a tale of love conquering all. But it's the "telling" that makes this fantasy a winner. It's a novel that starts off with thorns and blooms in the most unexpected of ways.
The raw pain of Beast (or Lord Beast as Isabeau calls him) is palpable, and calls to us at a visceral level. Beast's struggle to even understand why he'd been transformed from human to monster is very real.
Isabeau (the beautiful younger daughter of Beast's one and only ever "guest") is to me a mystery that reveals itself only towards the end of the novel. That's when we see the changes wrought in Isabeau's family in her absence through her eyes. We have seen it through Beast's, however, Isabeau's viewpoint rounds that picture out.
Just a fabulous rendition of a traditional tale.

 A Berkley Publishing Group ARC via NetGalley

*****

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