ARC Review: Hunted by Meagan Spooner

Hunted
Author: Meagan Spooner
Publication: HarperTeen (March 14, 2017)

Description: Beauty knows the Beast's forest in her bones--and in her blood. 

Though Yeva grew up with the city's highest aristocrats, far from her father's old lodge, she knows that the forest holds secrets and that her father is the only hunter who's ever come close to discovering them.

So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. Out in the wilderness, there's no pressure to make idle chatter with vapid baronessas...or to submit to marrying a wealthy gentleman. But Yeva's father's misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he'd been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance.

Deaf to her sisters' protests, Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory--a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva's only heard about in fairy tales. A world that can bring her ruin or salvation. Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast?

My Thoughts: This was a lovely retelling of Beauty and the Beast. The setting seems to be somewhere in Russia. Yeva is the youngest of three sisters of a man who is now a merchant but who was once a famous hunter. When he loses his fortune in a risky venture, they go back to his long-abandoned hunting cabin deep in the forest. He resumes hunting but is losing his mind because he feels he is being watched.

When Yeva, called Beauty inside her family, goes out to look for him she finds herself captured by a Beast who has the need of a hunter. During her imprisonment she shares stories so that she can hear the sound of a human voice and has Beast as her mainly unseen audience. Her stories recall his human side which had been getting lost in the Beast.

I loved the language in this story. I loved that Beauty was always someone looking for something else -- that she never felt comfortable in any situation because she was always looking to the horizon for more. Beast was the same way which led to him being cursed by the elusive firebird. I loved the interludes when the Beast is the narrator. It is easy to see the conflict in his dual nature.

Even if you know the story, this version is well worth reading for the twists and turns Ms. Spooner adds, the wonderful, descriptive language and the nuanced characters. I highly recommend it to all lovers of fairy tales.

Favorite Quote:

Yeva filed the tidbit away, tying it down among the other scraps she'd collected. For now they were shreds of next to nothing, but perhaps, if she gathered enough of them, she'd be able to stitch them together into a tapestry with answers. For now, she would wait and listen for that far-off music. For maybe, somewhere in its rhythmic pulse, in the way it seeped into the empty spaces of her heart like warm honey into dry bread...maybe in that music she'd find the way to kill the Beast.

I got this one for review from Edelweiss. You can buy your copy here.