I enjoyed The Castle of Thorns. It was an easy read. I did find it tailored more to middle-young adult rather than new adult for the genre. I enjoyed the different spin on the retelling and Gisela’s character development. I do feel like it was slow at some parts so it was hard to keep my interest but I did want to see the conclusion and how it was wrapped up. The ending itself felt very fast paced. One minute we’re in the climax and the next we’ve wrapped up the novel in a few short pages. I would’ve liked to see more relationship development at the end with the situations that took place. Overall, a three star read for me because I did have to push myself to keep reading in a few spots and with the new adult category listing I was expecting a bit more adult content, but a good read nonetheless. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I was pleasantly surprised with this short (309 pages for me is short) retelling of Beauty and the Beast from Elle Beaumont. I’m not a fan of retellings. I actually have grown to hate them profusely lately. They’re prolific nowadays, and they usually only change a couple of things about the original tales and present as a new, “better” story. To that fact, I’ve read a ton of Beauty and the Beast retellings, spins, modernizations, etc., and while Beaumont’s The Castle of Thorns is unmistakably a retelling, it certainly feels much better done to me than most other retellings on the market. The absolute best thing about TCoT is the villain. There truly are no redeeming qualities to him; he’s a large beast, particularly violent, and shows no remorse for being so. He doesn’t possess any handsomeness to make the maiden fall for him, which truly made this a great retelling for me. I know the attractive villain is a trend right now, but I find Beaumont’s Knorren to be one of the best beasts in a Beauty and the Beast retelling overall. The end of the story brings about change but not at the expense of character development. And the heroine, who usually just falls for the Beast because he’s hot, does not do so here because she’s actually awesome and has some scruples in the noggin. Secondly, and pretty much just as importantly, Gisela is a fabulous Beauty. I quite like the incorporation of all of her attributes and how she learns the depths of her own strength along the way. She’s also not anachronistic, which I really loved. She has a heinously debilitating illness, and her father the king coddles her for it, even at the expense of the lives of those in his kingdom. How this plays out in the story is fantastic, and I won’t go into much detail because it will spoil things. While I quite enjoyed the book, there were a couple of drawbacks that knocked the rating down from 5 to 4. Mainly, the pacing for the story was quite off for me. I felt the build up to the climax was done well, but the falling action and resolution were rushed and character development suffered for it. I felt like I had to go back and reread some of the action parts at the end several times to understand what was happening. Additionally, the romantic denouement was a bit abrupt. Because there were several story aspects happening at once, one overshadowed the other. In this case, the romance suffered for the subplot of kingdom politics. Perhaps with more fleshing out and a bit more length, the two could have been more seamlessly incorporated. As to some of the proofreading sides of things, the grammar was inconsistent. The same characters would use correct grammar in one sentence and incorrect grammar in another. Some readers may not notice this, but it did jar me out of the story quite a bit. Also, when the characters were prepping for bow usage, they “notched” their arrows instead of “nocking” them. Just small things that lend authenticity to a narrative for me but maybe not for other readers. I could truly go on and on about how much I enjoyed the story in this book. As I mentioned, I was quite shocked with how compelling I found the story. I look forward to reading more from Beaumont in the future. My thanks to Book Sirens and the author for the complimentary eARC, for which I freely give my own opinion.