This YA romance fantasy novel and a poor attempt at retelling Beauty and the Beast generated a lot of hyper over the years.

Mass’s attempt to recreate the classic Beauty and Beast tale fell far off the mark with her choice of main characters. Tamlin, as the beast, is farfetched. He’s sweet-tempered and not beastly in appearance but rather handsome, even if a mask hides half of his face, and due to an unbreakable curse, the mask can never come off. He’s the epitome of good, this guy doing everything to save not only his court but all of Fae’s lands against a blight that’s plagued them all, so please, how is he a candidate to represent the beast?

Feyre, as the mortal girl, the one who could be the loophole to break the curse and free Tamlin from his cruse and restore the magic for all High Lords, is spirited away to his manor in the Fae realm after she kills a fairy in wolf form. Feyre’s character development is a stumper. Here is this girl who’s the caretaker of her entire family for years, a hunter with strong survival instincts, and yet the moment she enters Tamlin’s court, she starts making the stupidest decisions, putting herself in danger time and time again as if she no longer has those survival instincts at all. She’s making those decisions out of stupidity, not bravery, which makes it more frustrating, considering she’s the one to represent Belle in this tale.

Sadly, the main characters are so bland they offer nothing remarkable for readers to hold on to. The sidekicks have more colors. Lucien, Tamlin’s emissary, acted more beastly than Tamlin with his scarred face, metal eye, and cold demeanor. With his schemes and games, Rhysland, the High Lord of the Night Court, offered some spice. Amarantha, the ultimate villain of the piece with her thrust for vengeance, is more interesting than the two main characters; even her quest to torture and kill Feyre and make Tamlin her lover because of her insane, twisted reasoning makes a semblance of sense.

The writing is not only inconsistent and poorly done, but it is juvenile. Mass couldn’t be bothered to formulate complete thoughts; instead, she adopted a shortcut system and inserted as many dashes as possible when words failed her to construct actual sentences. Over three hundred dashes in the first seventy pages alone, is extremely lazy writing, and it didn’t improve throughout the book, unfortunately to say, so this became a 1 star read, so much for all that hype.