I've read Robin McKinley's Beauty twice - the character of Beauty was spunky but not annoying, and I loved the tweaks McKinley had put on the original French tale. But that's all the luck I've found with B&tB retellings in book form. Rose Daughter, McKinley's second retelling, with all it's descriptions of rose gardens from a bland Beauty, bored me to death and I hardly got through the first third of the book before putting it down. I later tried Donna Jo Napoli's Beast but at thirteen I found first-person description of lion sex to be kind of gross and weird so I didn't finish that one either.
I heard about Alex Finn's book while looking at related books for Twilight on Amazon. I thought I would give it a shot - the cover art was cool enough, and while that's usually not a very accurate indicator of whether a book is actually going to be TOTES AWESOME, it worked for me when I bought Twilight last year.
The Beast is Kyle Kingsbury of New York City, a spoiled high school freshman, with good looks and a famous dad. Kyle likes to bully the less-beautiful and hook up with hot chicks. He hatches an elaborate plan to take the new Goth girl to his school dance - as a joke, a la Never Been Kissed. But when she figures it out that he's just screwing with her, she goes all Carrie on his ass, reveals she's really a witch, and curses him to become a "beast" - so his hairy exterior will reflect his mean, ugly interior. From there, things get worse for Kyle - his dad abandons him, basically imprisons him in a different home, where Kyle's only companions are a maid and a blind tutor. The rest of the story follows the traditional B&tB conventions - plain girl arrives in the Beast's castle (here, a ritzy townhouse), Beast scares girl at first, then gets her mad, then they start to get along, then they fall in love, Beast changes for the better, epic battle (here, something to do with girl's drug-addicted, alcoholic, abusive dad), sacrifice, near-death of Beast, and of course a happy ending with the Beast turning back into a normal person, only better.
Beastly has quite a few good aspects - I was intrigued by a modern setting, and having the Beast be a teenager - which is alluded to in the Disney movie but never really stamped in. I also liked how the witch character eventually had pity on Kyle but still had to stick to her original rules.
It's told from the perspective of the "Beast," like Napoli's book, but I find this probably the biggest problem. Finn's characterization of Kyle just isn't very convincing. At first, when Kyle is still a spoiled, horny, vain teenager, you kind of want to cringe because Finn is trying so hard and still failing. Maybe if the narration wasn't first-person, it wouldn't be so awkward. As the book goes on, Kyle changes into a better person, but seriously, I think he could have done that without all the moping and crying and blah blah blah - I get that he's all sad and stuff because he's a beast now, but there must have been a more engaging way to demonstrate this besides melodramatic monologues and getting all emo and stuff and changing his name to Adrian.
Even worse is the characterization of Lindy (as in Linda, as in "pretty" in Spanish - see what she did there???) - girl is so lame and boring and one-note that I don't really know how Kyle fell in love with her or how she had any part in his transformation. She's just ... there. And with bad teeth, apparently.
One word sum-up? "Slight." This book could have been so much more (there was an entire TV series about a Beast living in New York City) but in the end it was just perfunctory. It's still a good, quick read for a flight or the beach, but if you're interested in an engaging, beautifully written Beauty and the Beast retelling, pick up Robin McKinley's Beauty.
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