In Cruel Beauty, Nyx has been trained since birth to be an assassin so that she can fulfill her father's bargain to marry the demon lord, with the ultimately goal of killing him and bringing about the end of a 900-year-old curse that he had unleashed upon her town. Sounds promising, right? I love a good fairy tale retelling as much as the next person. But unfortunately, this story left me mostly confused.
When a girl is advertised to be an assassin, I expect a badass slaying demons left and right with swords and words. But Nyx is only trained to be a glorified diagram tracer, and that doesn't even play a part in the final battles. Her words also don't slay so much as annoy. She keeps saying how she's cruel, but really she's whiny and complains constantly. But "Whiny Beauty" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
There's a really weird love triangle in here. Our heroine insta-loves not just one guy, but two simultaneously. With guy #1, Nyx kisses him within a few minutes of meeting him. With guy #2, Nyx cycles between fearing him, slapping him, shouting at him, and kissing him. Any time he says something she doesn't like, she slaps him. That seems to be her preferred way of handling disagreements.
The dialog between characters feels so odd and stilted to me. Often when two people are talking, what each is saying individually makes sense, but not in the context of what the other is saying. It's like the author wrote one person's lines independent of the other, and then wove them together without making any edits. The odd dialog makes certain parts of this story really hard to follow, and I walk away from this not really sure I understood the crucial plot points.
I thought this would be a book of action, but it's actually a book of inaction. Nyx spends the majority of time thinking about what she needs to do and her feelings of hate and inadequacy, but almost no time actually doing anything relevant to achieve her goals. The majority of the book is spent with her walking down hallways, opening doors, and entering different rooms, while ruminating about kissing guys and how much she loves/hates her sister.
So many people wrote raving reviews about this book, so no one's sadder than me that it turned out to be a disappointment. In the end, no matter how hard I tried, it was just too hard to like a story that I couldn't quite follow and where I was often left befuddled by what the heroine was doing and thinking.
Readaroo Rating: 2 stars
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