The fact I picked this up during a readathon tells you that I was expecting to do nothing but love this and fly through it; oh how I wish that had happened. The concept still now intrigues me, and is something I would love to read, but I just was so disappointed by this; I really did, do, want to love every second of this book, but I just didn’t. Beware of slight spoilers.A beauty and the Beast retelling, based in medieval Russia with magic and strong, determined main female protagonist; this is just describing my idea of a fabulous story. Full of mystery, romance, and magical elements, I just wanted to adore this book. I’d been saving it for quite a while to be in the perfect mood to just sit and completely let myself be absorbed into this so I could devour every second.

Sadly this just didn’t happen. I found all the characters just so little developed that I could make absolutely no connection with any of them. At points where my heart should of been in my throat from fear of what would happen to them, I just didn’t care. I had no emotional connection to them what so ever.

The romance, was just so insta-lovely in the end. I got hopeful at one point that this may have a completely unpredictable ending, as the relationship was just so negative and had no signs of turning around. Yet in the last 50 pages, she all of a sudden falls in love with him? And works that out from a dream non the less. I know its a fantasy fairy tale, but this is just no where near realistic.

For me this book was filled with huge spaces of nothing happening; just as Id be about to put it down, something would happen and I’d think ‘well maybe its about to get good’. Then another 50 pages, and I’d be back to ‘nothing is happening’ and want to put it down; the whole book was just a constant cycle for me.

Although, yes, the ending wrapped everything up, it did so in a very rushed and sudden matter. With a long dialogue, a lot of which had been repeated earlier in the book, the whole situation was explained and straightened out in a very predictable, and I feel, very overdone metaphorical way.

I’m honestly so sorry to be having to write such a bad review for this, but I just had such amazingly high hopes for this book, and it didn’t even come close to them. It may not be helped by that I read a lot of 5 star books before this, but this was a huge disappointment for me and I honestly wanted this to be the perfect cosy fairy tale retelling that I believed it would be. In the end, I gave it 2 out of 5 stars as I did manage to get through the whole of it rather than put it down.