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My Take in Brief: Wonderful. Meg-worthy.

Hero and Heroine: French Prince Charles d’Harcourt, perfumer, disfigured as a child. He has a “blank bluish eye” with no pupil, a facial scar, and a bad leg which necessitates a cane. American heiress, 18 year old (and shows it), “mercilessly beautiful”, willful and intelligent, Louise Vandermeer.

Setting: Early twentieth century, first half or so on a transatlantic sailing from New York to France, the second half mainly in the south of France, where the hero lives.

Plot: Louise’s parents arrange a marriage to Charles, whom she has never met. Aboard the ship to France, she learns Charles is disfigured and much older, and decides to embark upon an affair with a dashing, but mysterious “sultan” she meets on board. Need I say more?

Word on the Web:

AAR, Sherry Thomas (what a treat!), DIK

The Romance Reader, 5 hearts

Mrs. Giggles, 95

Jill D., Romance Rookie, B+

Aunt Rowena, mixed (3 stars) (this blogger reads a book a day, but the review is more detailed and thoughtful than you would expect given that reading pace!)

Renee Reads Romance, A- (this is a fairly brief review)

Suisan, “a favorite”

Fun Factoid: Since the hero is a perfumer, we learn a lot about ambergris in this book, which is sperm whale sputum, a rare ingredient once used in perfumes. Ambergris is no longer harvested (immoral and pricey), although collecting it if found on the beach or floating in the sea is ok. Today most perfumers used a chemical substitute. Read more about ambergris here.

The Racy Romance Review:

This book is called Beast for a reason, and you won’t like it if you think people who care a lot about physical beauty are not worth reading about. Some reviewers say it is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and that’s true (she’s hot, he’s not, and beauty and its relationship to character is the main theme), but both Louise and Charles are complex, multilayered characters (in particular, she’s certainly no Belle), and I don’t recall sex scenes this hot in the Disney version. ;) .

Louise is so beautiful it’s a curse. She wants to be taken seriously, but her looks blind everyone to her other qualities. If you have no patience for that sort of “problem”, skip this one. She’s a flirt, a bit impetuous, a bit self-pitying, a bit self-important. But I like it that she’s not an eighteen year old written as if she’s 35. Some readers don’t care for Louise, and this exchange between Charles and his lover, Pia, typifies the polarized reactions this character invokes:

“She’s certainly a lot younger and wilder and — ” he paused, “oh, a little sadder, somehow, than I was expecting.”

“Sadder? God, Charles. Shes a little snot, is what she is. A vile, smart-mouthed little thing who is far too big for her own britches.”

For his part, Charles is obsessed with beauty and surrounds himself with beautiful lovers, the result, he knows, of his “horror of being thought ugly”. He’s actually quite vain, dressing to impress with such an attention to detail that Louise thinks him a dandy. When Charles overhears a young suitor describing him in unflattering terms, and Louise’s horrified reaction, he decides to seduce her in disguise. Louise is looking for a (first and) last fling before marriage, Charles is looking to teach her a bit of a lesson, and they both get more than they bargained for.

An easy lesson people draw from Beauty and the Beast (at least in its Disneyfied version) is that “beauty is only skin deep”, and that to know someone requires getting beyond surface qualities. Beast offers a much more complicated and mature lesson: our outer appearance, justly or unjustly, influences others’ attitudes and expectations towards us, and we internalize those expectations. Our looks are not like a shell we can remove to uncover  the “real” (nonphysical, presumably) person underneath, but are inextricably linked to the other, nonvisible, nonphysical parts of us, whether we like it or not. Charles is vain, hypersensitive, jealous, and prideful because he is disfigured, and Louise is impetuous and a bit snotty, because she is beautiful.

That Charles is older than Louise, and physically challenged (thanks to his bad knee) are not ignored or glossed over. The age difference is not only part of her initial revulsion towards him, but also his to her:

As Charles looked at her, he realized he hadn’t truly understood what eighteen meant. Her pouty lower lip came out as she played with the necklace strand at her collarbone making her look (accurately, he supposed) like a peevish adolescent.

Paradoxically, his age and experience make him a wonderful lover and teacher on board the ship, but undesirable when she meets the real Charles. And her youth irritates, scares, and at the same time attracts him. He later refers to his overwhelming attraction to Louise as “belated adolescent lust”.

I think a better way to characterize the themes explored in this book than to say “beauty is only skin deep” is to say that our relationship to our bodies and others’ bodies is complicated, and often contradictory, and it’s not just a personal, autobiographical one, but also mediated by social attitudes and expectations.

I loved the setting: early nineteenth century, shipboard.  The Titanic sailed and sank a decade later, but Ivory’s descriptions of the Concordia reminded me very much of James Cameron’s 1997 film (in a good way).  I used to not get it when romance reviewers gave points for novelty, but that was before I read 150 romance novels. Now, a unique setting means a lot to me.

Ivory utilizes the setting in more ways than I can count (or that you can stand to read about here!): metaphorically, in big ways, like that both hero and heroine are able to come unanchored from their normal lives and identities on the ship, and in little ways, like when Louise’s swaying skirts and hips are compared to the listing of the ship; creating intimate unusual spaces for tete a tete, like the hold for the dogs; or in the way a pearl rolls across the floor during a love scene. It made me realize that it’s one thing to have an unusual or unusually well drawn setting, but another to really make it an integral part of the novel.

The very long scene on the ship when Charles seduces Louise, in the dark, is now one of my favorites in all of romance. Even better, at the end of it all, Louise says it’s a good thing she didn’t know how great sex was or she “would be the biggest tart on earth.”!

Things get more complicated when they are married and settled in France. Louise finds Charles repugnant, his home strange and isolating, and pines for her lover. Charles, recognizing that his plan has backfired spectacularly, doesn’t force himself on her, in hopes she’ll come around. Obviously, the reader has to suspend disbelief here, and accept that someone could spend several nights in a man’s bed, and not recognize him in the daylight. The mental effort is worth it when you read passages like this:

Was this what fidelity felt like? she wondered. Like a kind of tantrum one couldn’t stop? A revolt at the thought of any but one and only one lover? How amazing. She had always imagined faithfulness had something to do with curtailing one’s own pleasure for the sake of not hurting the feelings of a beloved. Yet this feeling was nothing of the sort. It was selfish, pigheaded. Like wanting strawberries, tasting only the pleasure of strawberries, and preferring to starve rather than to have to choke down an apple…

This section of the book is heartbreaking, and Louise tested the boundaries of my patience at times. In one scene, Charles attempts to kiss Louise, and she recoils. I have added it to my in-progress list of 10 Most Heartbreaking Scene in Romance (8 slots of which Sherry Thomas books have already claimed). Charles realizes that telling her who he is will not only wound her pride, but that there’s a very real chance she’ll be horrified. It’s a mess: all he can do is keep trying to win her heart.

Eventually, of course, things get resolved. The one scene that didn’t work for me at all was near the end when one more wrinkle was added that I felt was unnecessary and a bit silly. Also, the epigraphs, selections from Charles’ monograph on perfume, did nothing for me. His interest and expertise in perfume, and the metaphor of the ambergris (something beautiful made out of something ugly) was clear enough in the body of the text. By way of confession, I admit I never read chapter epigraphs, so little do they usually contribute to the book, IMO. On the other hand, each section of Beast was prefaced by a Baudelaire quotation, and I’m a sucker for those.

There’s a lot more I could say about how much I loved the writing — there’s a brief scene in Charles’ lawn when they are petting a dog together — but this is already too long (what else is new).  Sometimes these “older” romances feel very dated to me. This one felt very fresh, and very unique. I loved it.

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