I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d recently read a Beauty and the Beast retelling. That book was The Beast’s Heart by Leife Shallcross, and it’s the Beauty and the Beast story from the Beast’s perspective. While there are a few elements from the Disney version that showed up (the curse is his punishment for being shallow, the library!), it mostly draws upon the fairy tale — the version with the down-on-his-luck formerly wealthy merchant with three daughters — and is a really nice fleshing out of the story.

One thing I loved was that this telling fixed the Stockholm Syndrome issue that can make this story uncomfortable. Isabeau, our “Beauty,” isn’t the Beast’s prisoner. He does initially demand that the merchant send his youngest daughter or he’ll kill him, but he never planned to follow through and is surprised when she actually shows up. He immediately feels terrible about it, apologizes to her, and explains that he was hoping to have someone who could remind him how to be human again (he’d gone feral for a while and had recently found his castle again and started living more like a human before her father showed up). He’s been all alone and is afraid that if he doesn’t interact with someone, he’ll lose whatever humanity he has left. He asks her to stay with him for a year, but she can leave at any time. She stays in part because she feels bad for him, but also because since her father lost his money, she’s been the one acting essentially as the servant for her father and sisters, and she could use the break. Let her sisters figure out how to cook and clean for a while. Meanwhile, he doesn’t learn until later how the curse can be broken, so he isn’t setting all this up to use her, either.

That idea that she’s on vacation and can leave any time she wants makes a difference in how the relationship feels. They’re much closer to being equals, and in novel form, we get to spend a lot more time on the development of their friendship instead of compressing it into a musical number. It’s also interesting getting his perspective, with the story told entirely from his viewpoint (in first person), so he has to guess at what she’s thinking, and he’s very much out of practice of reading other people.

One little detail I loved was that his grounds while the castle is enchanted contain gardens that stay in each of the seasons. So, say, if it’s a hot summer day, you can go to the winter garden and play in the snow. I’m not sure how the spring and autumn gardens would work, since those are transition seasons. Does the spring garden shrink back to the end of winter every so often, as soon as the trees are fully leafed out and the spring flowers have died back? Does the autumn garden re-grow the leaves after they fall? Or maybe the seasons rotate among the four gardens, so that it’s always one of the seasons in one of the gardens, but each garden goes through all the phases. They’re just out of sync with normal time so that there’s always a garden where it’s winter, fall, etc. I would pretty much live in the fall garden, I suspect, though I do also like spring.

The plot sticks fairly closely to the fairy tale, so there’s no real villain or external conflict. It’s mostly about the Beast getting his act together, and then there are some issues between the Beauty and her family. If you’re looking for a nice relaxing read that makes you feel good, this is an excellent choice. It’s going on my keeper shelf because I think it will make a good “comfort food” sort of book.