The Beast Within: A Tale of Beauty's Prince by Serena Valentino

Beauty and the Beast is one of my top 3 favorite Disney fairytales, both the animated and live action version, so I had to read Serena Valentino's book 2 from the villain series; The Beast Within: A Tale of Beauty's Prince. This is yet another book that I loved. I liked reading about the Beast's perspective and there was little mention about Belle. Of course she is a very important part of the story but I liked the focus being on other aspects of Beast's life, not just how she helped save him but how he helped save himself from his arrogant vanity and view of how women should be.

This version of the tale of Beauty and the Beast is slightly darker than what we Disney fans are used to, unless you have watched Disney's Once Upon A Time, but that is an entirely different conversation for another time. Anyway, The Beast Within gives readers more details on Beast's background, it portrays him and Gaston as the best of friends and it details him as being engaged two times before he has his run in with Belle. It was his reaction to a small detail that later turned out to be a test from his first engagement that led to his curse.

One thing that I did not like about this book was that it did not explain or mention where his parents were yet he was still a just prince. Despite there being an extravagant ball where he met his second fiance and got his first sight of Belle, his parents were no where to be found. I thought that odd. Another way this book was interestingly different from the movies was that his perception of his cursed servants was different than that of anyone else in the story and definitely different from the movies. To Beast, his cursed servants were more like statues that randomly appeared whether he needed them or not. Plus they did not talk to him, it was as if they couldn't. But to Belle and the other servants they were lively, although still not in their human bodies, but they could speak to her and each other. Beast's castle became a very dark, creepy, and lonely place to him but that is exactly how his first fiance who turned out to be a witch wanted it to be. She wanted him to learn that vanity and status is not everything and that if he couldn't learn to love or be loved truly then his life would forever be dreadful. You know, same as the movies. Another thing that was same as the movies was that Gaston dies but it is after he has forgotten that he was best friends with the beastly prince.

There was a lot of anger and denial from Beast which I see as something that helps reminds readers that he is human and there was yet again a reminder that vanity can be very harmful. That is a theme that keeps recurring in fairytales and many other stories. Interesting we humans are and sometimes boring. Vanity, smh.

Tale as old as time,

The Black Bibliophage