Recent Reads: Rose & Thunder by Lilith Saintcrow – I loved this.
ROSE & THUNDER is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and look, I’ll be honest, you have to really fuck it up for me to not like a BatB retelling. Lili is not an author prone to fucking things up, and she loves BatB as much as I do, so… yeah, I loved this.
The setting is more or less the real world. It was published in 2015 and sort of feels like it’s set around 2005, but it’s basically urban fantasy; the world as we know it, with some added magic. And I’m always really interested in how writers pull off the Beast in a non-historical fantasy setting, because it’s always struck me as increasingly unlikely that there’s a Beast, the closer we get to modern times. The 80s BatB tv show pulls it off; the 20teens ‘reboot’ does, uh, not.
Lili, surprising no one, succeeds magnificently. I was really, really pleased with how she dealt with that, both in the beastliness and the transformation. Very nicely done.
The world she’s built is complex and dark and dangerous, with grace notes of tremendous beauty (my favorite of those is set up very early and paid off very late, which is tastiest of all), and yeah, I just really loved this one. :heart eyes: