Flight into Fantasy

I like fairy tale retellings, especially when they’re done in interesting ways I hadn’t ever considered, so I knew I would enjoy reading Alex Flyn’s Beastly. This is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast from the beast’s perspective.

Unlike Crazy Beautiful I find that I have a lot more positive things to say about Beastly now that I’ve given it time to settle. Flyn manages to successfully present the fairy tale in a modern setting, and Kyle/Adrian, the main character, is drawn very well.

Kyle Kingsbury is basically a little snot at the beginning of the book. He’s hot, he knows it, and he takes the opportunity to treat everyone like crap. Eventually, though, he picks the wrong person to humiliate when he snubs Kendra, a new girl who turns out to be a witch. She transforms him into a hideous beast, and, well, we all know where this is going. He’s got two years to make a girl fall in love with him. He convinces his father, a prominent newscaster, to move him into a brownstone in Brooklyn. His dad basically gives him an Amex card to do with as he will, hires a blind tutor, and he lives a pretty idyllic life, comparatively speaking, except for the beast thing. He eventually ends up changing his name to Adrian as well. And, of course, there is a girl for him. She’s nerdy, bookish Lindy, a scholarship student at his posh private high school. Unlike the traditional tale, Lindy isn’t pretty. And Lindy’s relationship with her father is much more complicated than it’s generally presented.

It’s hard not to like Kyle/Adrian, despite the fact that he’s such a brat at the beginning. His brattiness is explained–his father is too self-involved to pay much attention to his son, and anyway his dad is pretty much a grown-up version of his son. But Kyle/Adrian grows up over the course of the novel and realizes just how shallow and awful he has been. He learns to care about people–not just Lindy but Will, his tutor and Magda, his maid–seeing them for who they are and loving them for themselves and not what they can give him. And the message is delivered in a matter-of-fact manner that didn’t feel overly forced or preachy.

The other characters are also interesting. None of them are quite as well-drawn, in my opinion, as Kyle/Adrian, but I did have to mention Will, the tutor. He’s blind, and for the most part, Flyn got the blindness right. I didn’t even mind the end of Will’s story arc, which was hokey, because at the very least he was allowed to be a competent character who wasn’t a walking stereotype. I also loved Kendra, the witch, who takes an active part in the story beyond her initial curse. And Lindy was, of course, excellent. I could understand her motivations, and though I would have liked to glimpse the inside of her head, it wasn’t necessary and Flyn did a good job of portraying her evolving feelings for Kyle/Adrian.

There were also random intervals in which Kyle/Adrian talks with other transformed characters from other fairy tales in an online chat room. This was my favorite aspect of the book, as Flyn used these chats to subtly poke fun at fairy tale tropes. They were also quite funny, and, in at least one instance, surprisingly poignant. And I liked how Kyle tried to use the modern age to foil his curse. He creates a fake myspace profile and tries to meet girls online, only for them to turn out to be either too young, cops, or hideous old hags. Well, at least he tried, and I liked that Flyn went there.

I did have a few quibbles. The pacing starts out strong, but the middle dragged. For the most part I thought Flyn handled the fairy tales well, but I thought a few things were handled better than others. I didn’t really buy Kyle/Adrian’s obsession with his roses, for instance. And I also didn’t quite buy that Kyle’s dad would just hand over his Amex and say, “Sure, kid, go live by yourself with only a maid and a tutor for company as long as you’re out of my hair.” Maybe I could buy one of those, but not the other.

Overall, I was quite charmed by this book, and I felt that Flyn did the fairy tale justice. Apparently, Sleeping Beauty is the next fairy tale Flyn will tackle, and I look forward to reading it. As for this book, it rates a B-.

Other Opinions

Persnickity Snark
• Steph Su Reads
• The Ya Ya Yas
• YA Fabulous

P.S. I got this one from Bookshare.