Wow ... I had to pause for a few moments since I can't write a proper review right now. I'm so upset to have finished this book - but so thrilled to have read it. THIS WAS AMAZING, OKAY.

Cruel Beauty Book Review | Common Sense Media

I wanted bad-assery. I wanted more plotting. I wanted an assassin. Instead, I got not a lot of plotting, I got a lot of illicit kissing, I got a lot of falling in love. As beautiful as this book was, it felt to me that the MAIN plot of mayhem and murder got tossed aside for a love triangle. It wasn't exactly Throne of Glass bad, but it bothered me a lot the way Nyx skirted her mission for romance and dreams. In terms of plotting, the second half of the book was a big mess of confusion for me. I'm going to start this review doing a thing I usually find useless and infuriating, but which I am nonetheless sure every reader does, at least from time to time: a comparison. And a random enough comparison at that.On two different occasions Nyx and Shade tell each other that they wish they had met in another place. Nyx and Lux are eventually reunited in the altered timeline, where he had never been the Gentle Lord or she his wife.

Cruel Beauty – Rosamund Hodge

I love the hell out of Nyx snarky attitude, she is great and doesn't take any lip from Ignifex, which he finds divine and doesn't seem to want to kill her. They have this wonderful banter together, he kisses her, she threatens his life, that kind of stuff :) The mythology aspect was pretty cool. I’ll admit that. I enjoyed that more than the characters, the nonexistent plot, and the weird as hell ending. But it was only adorned with Greek mythology every now and then that made me feel better.. some real myths like Pandora's Box myth, and some strange as Nanny-Anna and Tom-Alone.. Anti-Hero: Nyx may be her peoples' hope of breaking free of the Gentle Lord, but that does not stop her from resenting the fact that she is essentially doomed to die in the process or worse, be trapped in the castle forever with her husband and his demons.I think that I wasn't liking it at the begining because Nyx is always changing her mind and I wanted to slap her sometimes, but also because the world in this book is really confusing! At first I didn't understand a thing about the "Hermetic" laws and the elemental hearts, then it became clearer, but we also had demons, gods, "kindly ones", shadows, mithology, fantasy, and so much more that I don't think I fully understood the world at the end of the book, but that doesn't mean I didn't like it, on the contrary, I found it very interesting!

Cruel Beauty Universe Series by Rosamund Hodge - Goodreads

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide. Get started Close I'm not sure of what to think of this book... I really loved it... but at the same time I didn´t? Let me try to arrange my thoughts... Astraia who is considerably more innocent and carefree, has a name delivered from the Greek "aster" - "star". It’s supposed to be a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but we got one hell of a desnse-uninteresting-FRIVOLOUS-beauty and one hell of a not-so-beastly-beast. She starts liking Shade because he's KIND to her and she falls in love with Ignifex because he loves her for who she is. ("I wanted to hit him again. I wanted to cry. Most of all, I wanted to forget my mission and lose myself in the embrace of the one person who had ever seen my heart and claimed to love me after.") Girl both of those are not reasons for love...... 😮‍💨😮‍💨

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The house, for which I demand a standing ovation: it is a house of horrors and wonders, a house that changes and has secrets to hide, and, as a setting, it confers on the story such a wonderful air of mystery that the reader cannot help soaking up and being bewitched by.