Little Beauty (an Eve Novella) by Mark Jonathan Runte

Rating: /10

Synopsis:

Cherbourg, Normandy – 1159

Shy Jehanne always lived at the mercy of her sisters’ spite and bitterness, preferring a life with the saints in her father’s library. Cherbourg was home and for her, it was the smaller pleasures of watching the ships in the harbor, searching for her father’s vessels.

She might have continued on that path, were it not for the storm that sank his beloved Maud and left her family ruined. Her sisters resented leaving Cherbourg’s society for a small home on the edges of a nearby wood. While her sisters griped over selling their baubles and her brothers struggled with simple woodcutting, she was teaching herself the basics of hunting to feed them through the long winter.

She never counted upon finding a huntsman and his party in the woods, nor accompanying him back to his country estate. No more that than the curse on his heart.

Review:

Think Beauty and the Beast, but gender-swapped and with werewolves, and you have the basic storyline of Little Beauty. 

It’s set in the 1100s in rural France, and focuses on Jehanne, a teenage girl who isn’t a werewolf, exactly, but she’s something between human and wolf (without the ability to shift between forms.) There are others featured in the story who are the traditional type of werewolf, but Jehanne is the main. Due to her unique biology, Jehanne has difficulty speaking, but she uses a form of sign language in order to communicate. Her father and siblings understand her sign language, but few others do. You may be thinking Jehanne is the “beast” when I mentioned Beauty and the Beast, but she is not. To my mind, the “beauty” and “beast” labels are applied to the characters’ personalities in this story, and Jehanne is the kindest, gentlest of souls.

The “beast” would be Perrin. He’s a prince with a curse that makes him as physically unfeeling as he is emotionally. The only way to break his curse is to find someone like Jehanne, to fall in love with her, and for her to love him in return. When Perrin is first introduced, he’s an awful man. Deceitful, arrogant, uncaring… You get the picture.

Little Beauty was a thoughtful take on the classic fairy tale, and I really enjoyed it. It’s novella length (so a quick read), and while it’s listed as part of the Eve series, it works perfectly as a standalone. I definitely recommend it.