#acsdal

[good-books-to-read]

Beauty & the Beast

A curse so dark and Lonely (ACSDAL) by Briged Kemmerer

Of beast and Beauty by Stacey Jay

Of curses and kisses by Sandhya Menon

A Court Of Thorns And Roses (ACOTAR) by Sarah J. Maas

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

[neverlearnedtoread]

A Curse So Dark and Lonely

⭐⭐⭐⭐; it is a truth solely acknowledged by me that the more cringefail a love interest is, the better the romance

Oh?? 👌😉😏

fairytale retelling! i love retellings of well-known stories. something something telling the same stories as our ancestors and our descendants binds humanity together something something

it takes a while to come to light, but the love interest is one of those 'head before heart' idiots. he's genuinely shrewd, politically savvy, and calculating, i.e. exactly the sort of person who doesnt fall in love easily. which makes him being the 'beast' in this beauty and the beast retelling so compelling! he's trying SO hard to engineer feelings and its just not working 😭

following off the above point: the love interest thinks he is inherently unlovable. nothing is juicier than someone who thinks they're too hard to love being proven wrong!

No.. ❌🤢🤮

isekai story, which as a trope teeters on the edge of losing me completely on principle; Kemmerer did manage to add enough details to keep me from totally losing my suspension of belief

just enough 'not like other girls' energy in the main character to make the first 50-100 pages hard to get through. i know its crazy, but consider: sometimes when a girl is kidnapped it's okay for her to have some level of caution / fear??

love triangle attempted(?) - wild choice from the author to make the guardsman hotter than the prince. i mean i get it, but if you're going to do that, can we not have the reason she doesn't choose him be so obviously and singularly because it wouldn't break the curse?

Summary: Harper, an 18-year-old girl with cerebral palsy, has a lot of problems - her mum has cancer, her father's a deadbeat who left them indebted to loan sharks, and her brother Jake is now working for said loan sharks to pay off those debts. Harper's always felt like a liability - too weak to help, let alone protect anyone - but when she sees a dodgy guy knock a girl unconscious in an alleyway, she has to try. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished - in the tussle, Harper finds herself magically transported to a parallel world with a whole new set of problems, including a cursed prince, an evil enchantress, and no way home.

Concept: 💭💭💭 Honestly, I didn't think too highly of this one! I had heard various criticisms about the prince being too broody and the sense of 'not like other girls' throwing others off, and it was selling itself as an unapologetic YA Beauty and the Beast retelling, so I wasn't thinking that this book would do anything crazy for me because Beauty and the Beast as a fairytale isn't my favourite.

Some spoilers under the cut!

Execution: 💥💥💥 On the whole, this book met my expectations exactly where I held them, which was a typical YA fantasy romance. I hold nothing against books that give me exactly what I expected - if I didn't think a book would suit my reading tastes, I wouldn't pick it up in the first place! I did have a hard time at the start - I'm pretty sensitive to 'not like other girls' vibes, so harper really grated on me, but once she and rhen understood each other better I was having a lot more fun. I kept pinballing between enjoying it (rhen being bad at romance) and rolling my eyes at it (harper being too Strong Women Feminist) through the middle but by the time we hit the 'i have to go home to see my family before its too late' story beat, the book was clawing its way to a solid 4 stars.

Personal Enjoyment: ❤❤❤❤ Despite being a predictable YA fantasy romance, Prince Rhen was a pleasant surprise. It is my personal (and therefore, correct) taste that male love interests are best when they are, at heart, cringefail. Rhen fits this criteria perfectly - he can wine and dine and politick with the best of them, but what he wants to do is save his people, and for that he needs someone to fall in love with him for realsies. He is wholly unable to accomplish both (on account of him being very shit at love) until Harper jostles him forcibly out of his holding pattern - he tells her he's doomed to fail, and she still convinces him to wholeheartedly try. It makes Harper not only the heroine of the story, but specifically Rhen's saviour - that's true romance, babey!! Their chemistry was the cornerstone of me rating the book 4 stars - with special shoutout to Lilith being shamelessly used as a plot device to make the romance go. We love an evil enchantress who is petty and bitchy.

Favourite Moment: The sweetest moment of the book was definitely Harper inviting Rhen into her room after learning Lilith tortures him every night. It was such a genuinely heartfelt moment that brought them together! But I love mess, so my actual favourite moment is when they kiss right before Harper leaves for DC, only for Harper to recoil from the sharp scales growing over Rhen's skin. The horror!! The drama!! The 'if you haven't fallen in love with me at this point, you certainly won't now'!!! and then Harper just going home without any resolution at all. NO ONE ELSE was having fun in that scene but me! and THAT'S BEAUTIFUL 😝

Favourite Character: Prince Vincent Aldrhen of Emberfall, cringefail king. Yes I understand he's horrible for any number of reasons, and no, I will not be retracting my statement. There's nothing more fun to me than a character who is convinced they are unlovable and has the evidence (and track record!!!) to prove it. This dude was like 'kissing this girl i like is more emotionally devastating than being magically tortured by a crazy evil enchantress every night because I will only be able to do it the once'. I can't NOT root for him to be dicked down!!

[massiveladycat]

2/? rant of how much i absolutely hated AHSFAB by brigid kemmerer - grey is dumb. no other explanation. so, if you know that there’s a bounty for your head, would you use a magic bracelet to disappear and reappear while someone is sleeping in the same room as you? WELL OBVIOUSLY NO!! DUMBASS!! - suddenly the author decided that rhen should become a full on villain just for the sake of making grey look like a hero? it’s 100% wrong. - wait a minute. we are just gonna take a world tour? even if Lia Mara is kind and well known, we are literally forgetting ALL ABOUT how shyl shallow absolutely slaughtered emberfall's people. hellooooo?!? you have been killing their people and burning their cities, the last book ended with an INVASION, and you want me to believe that people would just trust her just because she looks nice and is kind? LMFAO WHAT THE FUCK - the characters are a mess. rhen now goes against everything he did in the previous novel. grey wants to reclaim the kingdom, despite having no clue of politics or any of the things you must know to be a king. harper is apparently now not even a side character in her own story; she got a chapter and a few scenes she popped up in, and even those scenes were just her whining that rhen wasn't cruel. jake suddenly wants to fight against his sister and not return to earth. - why didn't grey just.. say he was the heir?? i get that rhen was traumatized by magic and he seems very skittish and afraid and desperate to find the magesmith/heir, but that's because he thinks that they'll put him in the absolute hell he was trapped in again, that they'll ruin the kingdom. if grey had just told him, and insisted that he genuinely did not want the throne and he didn't want to cause any harm, the chances are that rhen would've accepted. well, ACSDAL rhen anyway. all rhen fans are invited to his funeral. cause of death; character assassination. - the people should not have started rallying behind grey if only for the fact that (a) it was established that these people fear magic, and for good reason because they've been killed by the dozens by some random monster and the kingdom wasn't doing ANYTHING and (b) HE HAD NO TRAINING TO BE A KING WHERE RHEN HAS BEEN A ROYAL HIS ENTIRE LIFE!!

[friendly-neighbourhood-librarian]

Can I read your thesis once you write it???

I just finished A Curse So Dark And Lonely, by Brigid Kemmerer, and wow, it might be even better than The Beast's Heart. That's a fantastic twist on Beauty and the Beast's story, and, this time, I'm using fantastic in its literary sense of "a story that starts in the real world and then gets invaded by the magical". Harper is truly awesome and badass, and I would have loved to see Grey's POV through the story, he's so good and loyal. Rhen is interesting insomuch as he's different from what the character of the Prince usually is in these contemporary rewritings. He's much more pro-active in his life and passive in his curse, if that makes sense, while most other Princes linger in their resignation and frustration.

That was such a fascinating read, I can't wait to start writing my thesis on modern rewritings of B&tB and compare it with The Beast's Heart, A Tale of Love and Revenge, Uprooted or Once Upon A Time, Belle. If you guys know more rewritings in contemporary literature of the tale, please do drop recs, the more samples I have for my thesis, the better!

[oblivion-books]

“Failure isn't absolute, just because you couldn't save everyone doesn't mean you didn't save anyone.”

ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ― Brigid Kemmerer, A Curse So Dark and Lonely

[caitsbooks]

"When the world seems darkest, there exists the greatest opportunity for light.”

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[maricanread]

(A curse so dark and lonely - chapter 53)

Harper's finally got it

[skumreads]

Dreaming about color coded bookshelves

[allisoinreynolds]

BOOKS READ IN 2022: A CURSE SO DARK AND LONELY (& CURSEBREAKERS SERIES), BY BY BRIGID KEMMERER. Failure isn't absolute, just because you couldn't save everyone doesn't mean you didn't save anyone.

[lifeishell005]

[vault--of--amber]

RAW AND MIND-BLOWINGLY POWERFUL BOOK TITLES: A LIST

If We Were Villains (M.L.Rio)

This Savage Song (V.E.Schwab)

We Were Liars (E.Lockhart)

Then We Came To The End (Joshua Ferris)

We Are The Ants (Shaun David Hutchinson)

A Curse So Dark And Lonely (Brigid Kemmerer)

[princessofdisi]

i’d never run for a man but if grey called me “my lady” i might sprint a little

[kiwichaeng]

hi hello Rhen is deserving of love and forgiveness

[massiveladycat]

rating: A HEART SO FIERCE AND BROKEN BY BRIGID KEMMERER ooohh. oooohh. i have never hated a book so much. i should not have gone in with such high expectations. mm. two stars. the character assassination and the villainization of ptsd with rhen is absolutely insane. character development?? i dont know her RHEN'S THE VILLAIN? the boy who fought his monstrosity and suffered every moment when hurting his subjects? the man who tried to die rather than keep the whole affair going? he turned into a vicious, cruel man, on the account of his literal trauma with being tortured for YEARS by MAGIC and now his people doubting him? and now, his ptsd is being villainized? i call bullshit, kemmerer. this “series” should have been a standalone. let’s not even try to talk about how much of a hypocrite AHSFAB grey is. if he had been honest from the very beginning, everything could have been avoided. also, we literally spent this WHOLE book watching Mara Lia and grey fight for peace, but once she gets the crown from her mother, grey decides to take a tour with her spreading propaganda against rhen. and theeeen Grey decides that Rhen is not a good ruler, so he actually decides to declare war on Rhen and *his* people? his home country? ooh. this book makes me so angry i am making so many parts ranting about it. 1/?

[woeohtherot]

everyday i wake up thinking about “if she touched me with any kind of gentleness, i would collapse against her”

[booksandbumblebees]

"the most dangerous person at the party is always the girl sitting alone with a book "

- Brigid Kemmerer