Hunted by Meagan Spooner
Summary
Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones—and in her blood. Though she grew up with the city’s highest aristocrats, far from her father’s old lodge, she knows that the forest holds secrets and that her father is the only hunter who’s ever come close to discovering them.
So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. Out in the wilderness, there’s no pressure to make idle chatter with vapid baronessas…or to submit to marrying a wealthy gentleman. But Yeva’s father’s misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he’d been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance.
Deaf to her sisters’ protests, Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory—a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva’s only heard about in fairy tales. A world that can bring her ruin or salvation. Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast?
Book Details
Hunted by Meagan Spooner
On Sale Date: March 14, 2017
Young Adult Fiction, Fairy Tales & Folklore
HarperTeen, 384 pages
Source: Publisher
My Rating: 4.5/5 Stars
Beautifully written and wildly haunting, HUNTED will captivate readers with its unique Beauty and the Beast retelling as it weaves a dazzling tale of magic and danger.
HUNTED is an inspired retelling of the classic fairy-tale Beauty and the Beast. Spooner puts her own creative twist to the original story by incorporating threads of the Russian folktale, Tsarevitch Ivan, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf into it. Imbuing the story with an old-world feel while the danger, romance, and magic make it hard to put it down.
“Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones—and in her blood.”
Yeva is a spirited heroine to admire. One filled with a restlessness and longing she can't quite understand. Called Beauty by her family, the wild untameableness of the forest calls to her. Hunting and tracking are second nature to her, a love for the forest that her father fostered upon her, yet, she is older now and must put these things aside. Her duty and need to please her father and that of her desire to be free are palpable, and it is this warring desires that make her so fascinating.
When disaster strikes and her father loses his fortune, he moves Yeva and her sisters, Lena and Asenka, back to the outskirts of town to his hunting cabin. Yeva finally feels free at last to hunt and roam the forest she once ran free as a girl. The same forest her father's whispered secrets to her of beasts, fairy tales and enchantments seems to call to her. When her father doesn’t return home from a hunting trip, Yeva is determined to rescue him and hunt down the mysterious creature he’d been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance.
“Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory—a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva’s only heard about in fairy tales.”
With its wild, forestry landscape and mysterious castle setting, HUNTED paints a vivid and frosty world, one where enchantment, spells and magical creatures lurk. This is the Beast’s world and despite her skill, Yeva finds herself captured.
The dynamics between the Beast and Yeva are slow to build, with a wide range of emotions, from hate and Yeva’s determination to kill the Beast to a slow understanding of the terrible curse and the battle the Beast’s struggles to keep the very last shred of humanity he has, which Yeva undeniable brings out in him.
“She moves like beauty, she whispers to us of wind and forest—and she tells us stories, such stories that we wake in the night, dreaming dreams of a life long past. she reminds us of what we used to be.
She reminds us of what we could be.”
The longer amount of time she spends with the Beast and uncovering secrets of his curse and discovering that not all the tales of the forest her father told her were just fairy tales, Yeva can’t help but wonder what will happen to her when she leaves the Beast’s enchanted world.
“We curse everything, for we are cursed, and we have no arms to shelter her and no lips to press to her hair and above all no words to tell her that we know loss and we know pain and if they were monsters we could fight we would have slain them in her name long ago like the heroes of old. But we are not a hero. We are cursed.”
Perfect for fans of fairy tales, HUNTED by Megan Spooner brings something wonderful and unique back into retellings.
