Have you any Beauty and the Beast retellings? Let me know in the comments!
Though she 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?
Even though I’ve had my eye on Hunted for a while, I doubted that I would like it. Then I found out that Hunted is a darker, more twisted version of Beauty and the Beast that we all know and love—- #thanksDisney.
I didn’t think that I would even start Hunted. I had it on my shelf for a while and honestly… I was kind of tired of seeing it there, so I was just going to return Hunted unread to the library. Even when I opened up Hunted and read the first few pages, I thought that I would not enjoy Yeva’s story. At all. Yet I gave Hunted a chance — I’m glad I did.
What kept me reading Hunted was a little blurb on the front of the book: “A Beauty deadlier than the Beast.” I wanted to know how deadly Beauty could be.
The number one thing that I enjoyed reading about in Hunted was that there were two points of view. Though admittedly, the second point of view that we read from is one that we only see for a few seconds at the end of each chapter.
I wasn’t sure about Hunted because the first few pages were completely different than what I had envisioned this story to be. I had expected an action scene to kickstart the story. Instead, the start to Hunted is tame. However, a saving grace in this story is that it reads swiftly.
What captivated me was the second point of view. We read from Beast’s point of view, but only once at the end of every chapter. And Beast doesn’t really speak for themselves, but more so, he thinks and acts as part of a bigger symbiotic. If the story ever got boring, I could always count on reading Beast’s take on things.
It’s easy to tell how much thought and detail went into telling this story. I’m always a stickler for detail, so I have a love-hate relationship with the detail we read in stories. Sometimes there’s too much of it, and sometimes there’s too little (though with my imagination, stories are almost always colourful). There’s a perfect amount of detail in Hunted though.
I’m not usually one to read authors notes, or authors acknowledgements. Yet for some unknown reason I read the notes from Hunted. It did not occur to me that the story takes place in a medieval Russia! When I read that it did, I was surprised.
I ended up enjoying Hunted way more than I thought I would. I’m kind of shocked that I ended up liking Yeva’s story. Especially because the synopsis for Hunted is so tame in comparison of what actually happens in the story. I like that while this story is a rendition of Beauty and the Beast, Hunted became it’s own unique Beauty and the Beast story.
I give Hunted, 3 stars.
Have you read Hunted?
Happy Reading!
— Adele
Adele Is Reading 
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