Beast (original 2000; edition 2004)

Beast was my first audiobook of 2012, although I’d tried two others before—the public library’s copy of The Night Circus was scratched and their recording of Alexandre Dumas’s The Black Tulip featured a truly awful narrator.

Disappointed with my recent string of bad luck, I was browsing the shelves of the YA audio section, saw this, and thought, Why not? I'd tried reading a couple of Napoli’s fairy tale retellings as a preteen, without much success, but this particular title had been bouncing around in the back of my mind for a while. I think I would have read it years ago had I not been toying with the idea of writing a novel with a similar concept: a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” from the Beast's point of view.

The premise of the book is fabulous, and I’m not just talking about the Beast-as-narrator idea; setting the story in medieval Persia was also a terrific notion. Unfortunately the execution is somewhat uneven.

I was surprised and fascinated by how Napoli chose to portray the prince in the opening chapters. Perhaps due to the Disney movie, I had always thought of the Beast pre-transformation as deeply flawed: vain, selfish, spoiled, even cruel. This is how I would have written him if I ever came around to writing my “Beauty and the Beast” novel. It gives him more room to grow as a character, and the paradox of becoming kinder and less beastly in character while outwardly a beast is a truly beautiful thing. Napoli’s Prince Orasmin is imperfect but not all that bad; his tragic flaw is that he is perhaps not quite as diligent in studying The Koran as he ought to be, which causes him to make a mistake regarding an animal sacrifice. The invites the wrath of a pari (or fairy), who then curses him.

I enjoyed the depiction of Persian/Muslim culture in this part of the book (I was previously unaware that one of the names for God in Islam is “The Merciful One”), but I didn't think that the magical cause-and-effect was very clear. Why did one of the pari’s spells work, turning Orasmin into a lion, while her curse dooming him to die at his father’s hands never came true? The explanation Napoli ended up offering sounded more like an excuse, a hallmark of bad fantasy writing.

It was at this point of the book that I really started to have problems with the story. Orasmin is now a lion trapped on his father’s hunting grounds, cursed to die at the Shah’s hands—so what does he do but take some off to copulate with a couple of lionesses? The descriptions of leonine sex mad me laugh, but as another reviewer pointed out, they’re also rather disturbing once you remember that Orasmin’s mind and soul are still those of a man. The next third of the book, which is set in India and documents Orasmin’s struggle to live happily as a lion without breaking the pari’s curse, is less ridiculous but basically more of the same.

The arrival of Belle on the scene rejuvenates the narrative. She is easily the best of Napoli’s creations, shyer and more frightened than I had seen the character portrayed before, but still strong, feisty, and loving. I also loved the care Orasmin-as-lion took to prepare the castle for her, although the way he imagines her to be a very small girl child who he can rear up to care for him romantically is unnerving to say the least. I was certainly glad when she turned out to be a mature young woman instead. I would have liked for this section of the book featuring the romance to go on longer. While there is a certain minimalist beauty to the ending, my first reaction was “That’s it?”

Robert Rodriguez’s reading of the audiobook was average. In the opening chapters I found his delivery a bit stilted, lacking passion and full of odd pauses. He seemed to gain confidence as he went along, though, and there was one moment in particular when his voice deepened and almost sounded like a growl. It was a nice touch.

Passable, and recommended to readers who just can’t get enough of “Beauty and the Beast” stories, but Robin McKinley’s Beauty is still to be preferred. ( )

I enjoyed reading the classic Beauty and the Beast story from the perspective of the Beast. The thing I found most interesting in the novel was the Prince's constant battle to stay human in some way. The primitive urges of the lion body constantly pulled at him. Some he was forced to accept (such as feeding himself) while others he tried to obscure by trying to remain human, even though he knew there was a good chance he would never be human again.

A look at Beauty and the Beast where the Beast is a Persian Prince. He is making an offering of a camel but she is not pure. He decides to go ahead with the sacrifice anyway as all of the preparations have been made and there are no other camels they can use. As a result he is cursed to be killed by his own father and transformed into a lion.

He first tries to live as a lion and travels to India. He tries to fit in with a couple of different prides but he doesn’t really understand the laws of the lions. He has his own mind but in a different body. He is chased away on more than one occasion and is lucky to still be alive. From there he travels to France and the story becomes more traditionally Beauty and the Beast when a man finds the castle where he has been living and in exchange for his life he promises to being his youngest daughter to live with the Beast.

I wanted to like this but it didn’t really grab me. It was like reading two completely different books that had been sandwiched together. I know it’s a fairy tale, but I still wanted to be able to believe in the story and the characters and I really didn’t. My favourite was the little fox cub who got a very raw deal I felt poor thing. One thing I did like though was all the Persian detail and the glossary at the back of the book. A lot of research clearly went into writing it and it’s a shame it felt so short and glossed over. ( )

I've always loved the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, so when I found this retelling I was excited. It is shelved in my local library as Young Adult, and I couldn't agree more with that designation.

The story itself is interestingly set in Persia. I found the religious references and the folk lore fun to read. The majority of the story is set in both Persia and India. These were my favorite parts. I was hoping the Beauty part of the story would vary more than it did. But again, we had to travel to France and meet an oh-so-sweet girl who is destined to free the Beast from his curse.

I was honestly disappointed with the lack of originality in the end. This did not stop me from enjoying the book for what it was - a retelling of a classic aimed at a younger audience than myself. I will definitely be recommending it to my niece and my own children when they're a bit older. ( )

I can't say that I really enjoyed this book. It's a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, a story that I love, but in this case I didn't find that the retelling improved on the story at all. The premise is intriguing enough: this is Beast's story, starting from before he met Beauty and explaining how and why he came to be a Beast. Unfortunately, I thought the reason for his transformation was unsatisfying, the descriptions of his time as a beast were distasteful, and he was a pretty unlikeable character overall.

Beast is set in Persia, and the protagonist is a prince. As his servant is preparing a camel for sacrifice at a religious festival, he notices that the camel has a scar that makes it unfit for this sacrifice. The servant has no alternative camel ready, an oversight that could result in a severe penalty, possibly even death. The prince, who has a good heart and a dislike for the suffering of others, weighs the risks and benefits and decides that the camel should be sacrificed despite the flaw. This will save the servant and help the people, who receive portions of the meat. And, he reasons, God is merciful.

It's not entirely clear why this reasoning breaks down. The prince is turned into a beast (a lion, in particular) not by God, but by the angry spirit of the camel. I can't honestly say why the camel was angry, because it wasn't explained what exactly happens to an animal that is sacrificed inappropriately. For whatever reason, though, the prince is punished for his attempt to do good by being turned into a lion, and the curse will only be broken if he wins a woman's love (this part is explained by the camel being female, though again, the logic here isn't entirely clear to me). Needless to say, if the goal is to bring the Beast to life by providing his backstory, the backstory needs to make sense. I wasn't exactly satisfied in this regard.

So then the prince is a lion, and does lion things. Although as a man he has never laid eyes on a women other than his mother, his first act as a lion is to mate with some female lions in the palace hunting grounds. This wasn't described in very much detail, but I still could have done without it. I just didn't need to hear about his “thrusting”. Also, note that this is a YA book, or possibly even children's. The prince also spends a lot of his time hunting, which I didn't find very interesting. Basically, I wasn't really into the story until the requisite scene where Belle's father encounters the beast while seeking shelter from the storm; i.e., until Napoli's story converges with the traditional version. Unfortunately, this didn't happen until more than halfway through.

I did enjoy the development of the Beast's relationship to Belle, but I couldn't fully like him because of the way he treated her pet fox. This fox was possibly the best character in the story; he was loving, playful, loyal, forgiving, and basically wonderful all around. And the Beast constantly thought things along the lines of “What a stupid animal” or “That foolish fox....”, for no particular reason that I could see. I'm not sure how he changed from someone who seemed so compassionate initially into someone who thought badly about innocent animals; and no matter how well he treated Belle, I think his ideas about the fox were more telling about his personality.

So, an initially likeable man is transformed into a beast because he made a religious error while trying to help others; once he's a beast, he becomes less likeable rather than learning any sort of valuable lesson.

I've enjoyed other books by Donna Jo Napoli in the past, but I think I'll stick to Robin McKinley for Beauty and the Beast. ( )