Cruel Beauty | Rosamond Hodge

☆☆☆.5 

'Her mission was to kill him, her destiny was to love him'

FunFact: I read this on my kindle in one sitting on my plane ride and I very much enjoyed the experience and the book.I’m still contemplating whether to give it the 3.5 or the 4 but I think a percentage would be better; in that case I give it a solid 85%.

This book was straight up complex yet super interesting. Definitely not an easy breezy book that you can skim through; you really have to understand it to be able to read it. I didn’t think that I would actually like this at all but it was very intriguing especially the first third of this book. The book starts of very vague; it is a y/a stand alone.Based on 'The Beauty and The Beast', Cruel Beauty is about a girl called Nyx and since birth she has hated the evil ruler of her kingdom because of a bargain initiated by her father, since birth she has been training to kill him even though she also has to marry him.

I highly, highly enjoyed reading about this main character: Nyx, she was very cool. She was by no mean the greatest female protagonist I have ever read, I mean she had her flaws but she wasn’t “not like other girls” and I loved that Rosamond Hodge wrote this heroine with realistic characteristics and personality. There were times where I despised her stupid actions and feelings; most of the book I was screaming “SWALLOW THOSE BUTTERFLIES, NYX”. Absolutely loved her from the beginning. I honestly really liked all the characters for what they’re worth and I especially envied all their names; their names were the best!This book is written in first person with Nyx’s point of view. It’s set in a somewhat medieval point in time because of the dialogue and terminology however there was so much about Greek Mythology and I wasn’t complaining because I love learning things in books and I just happened to learn a bit more about Greek Mythology in this one.

A crucial part of this novel is that there’s a hella lot of Greek mythology that you have to understand. I by no means am a specialist in Greek mythology but I do know quite a bit, mostly from Percy Jackson and the Olympians because that whole series is based on Greek gods and what not. So I was somewhat familiar with the terminology but I can see where some people my struggle if they don’t know very much or anything about the Greek gods and that would be where they get into a slump and really dislike the book merely because they don’t understand any of it. The mythology straight up is hard to grasp at once (maybe that’s just me) especially if you don’t know anything about it prior, It’s not written like it is in the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan where the learning is very easy to understand but then again that's middle-grade.

That also brings me to the writing style of this book and I’m gonna be frank here, I didn’t not like it but I didn’t love it either. Maybe it was the world it was written in and the time but it just wasn’t doing it for me, although I strongly encourage you to give it a go even if you’re sensitive to writing styles. The one thing that let me down had to be how fast the romance picked up in this book. At first I thought it was unrealistic and dumb; just another one of those books where they slip in an unexpected romance just to increase the readings but later did I realise the impact and how well written and crafted it was. Not sure if I would recomend this but if you're really into Mythology and Fantasy this is the book that ticks all that. Its not that I didn't enjoy the book because I did yet I only have it a 3.5 because of the writing style.

~fi
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