Date: 2007
Format: paperback
Acquired: borrowed from a friend
Read: for a teen book club/Once Upon a Read-a-Thon
Pages: 300
Reading time: three hours
From GoodReads: I am a beast. A beast! Not quite wolf or bear, gorilla or dog but a horrible new creature who walks upright. I am a monster. You think I'm talking fairy tales? No way. The place is New York City. The time is now. It's no deformity, no disease. And I'll, stay this way forever ruined unless I can break the spell. Yes, the spell, the one the witch in my English class cast on me. Why did she turn me into a beast who hides by day and prowls by night? I'll tell you. I'll tell you how I used to be Kyle Kingsbury, the guy you wished you were, with money, perfect looks, and the perfect life. And then, I'll tell you how I became perfectly...beastly.
My review: I was expecting a lot from Beastly, but it turned out to be meh. It's a decent read, but the plot, characters, and writing combination didn't "wow" me. It seemed so predictable: take the typical snotty prep-school, self-absorbed hot guy, throw him into a Beauty and the Beast retelling, and you end up with the stereotypical boy-finds-out-that-looks-don't-matter story, helped along by his falling in love with the resident bookish girl. The plot was straight out of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The contemporary setting with high school kids and New York City increases the interest factor, but it doesn't hold up for all 300 pages once the storyline becomes more standard. A good read insofar as it's not poorly written and boring, but I've read better retellings of fairy tales.
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