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[katara]

Title: Creeping Beauty

Author: Andrea Portes

Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Fairytales, Middle School

Date Started: February 8th, 2023

Date Finished: February 9th, 2023

Status: Finished

Rating: 2.6/5

Sypnosis: From the bestselling author of Anatomy of a Misfit comes a subversive and feminist take on Sleeping Beauty, sure to appeal to fans of Damsel and To Kill a Kingdom.

Bitsy is no one’s ideal princess.

She’s heard it all: that it’s a shame she’s so plain, so lacking in grace. That the best thing for her to do is simply wait (and wait some more), and hope some prince will grant her a happy ending.

Then Bitsy pricks her finger on a spindle and falls down, down, down.

Into a world where cutthroats and con artists are more common than curtsies. Where no one ages and everyone is beautiful. Where an inscrutable evil rests at its core.

A land where Bitsy’s fate and her future are solely in her own hands—and neither are what she expects.

The dark and deadly world of Heartless meets the empowering twist of Cruel Beauty in this thrilling, unpredictable, multigenre retelling of one of the most beloved fairy tales: where instead of falling asleep to await her prince, this sleeping beauty finally wakes up.

Review: A retelling of Sleeping Beauty.

One of my favorite fairytales!

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Princess Elizabeth Celementibe DeBoudas Roix aka Bitsy does feel she is beautiful as her mother. Her mother, the queen, is everything that beauty is. From the strands of her hair to her beautiful figure. But Bitsy is everything to her mother. She loves her immensely but she wants to see her married. As does her father that he arranges for princes from all over to be paraded for Bitsy to marry. One day, one does come and Bitsy is far from interested that she disappears into a room where a spindle awaits her. Touching it and she is transported to another world. A place where she has to fight in order to return.

I have to admit the premise of the book drew me so that I had to request it. Sleeping Beauty has always been a favorite next to Beauty and the Beast. So, to find a book with this element was surprising and yet slightly disappointing to me. The book's writing style was different in that it went from breaking the fourth wall to entries from the king to Bitsy's adventure in a world that seemed a bit out of a mixture of Alice in Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty. There was a lot going on and the plot felt like it was all over the place. The writing in particular could not decide between young adult to middle-school children's books. One moment, we see it geared toward young adults with small scenes of kisses to images of violence and then the writing changed and became geared toward middle school children. It kinda almost lost me there. I contemplated not finishing it.

But I wanted to see the end. I wanted to see if Bitsy made it back home. But did it end so abruptly? The cliffhanger (or whatever you want to call it) fell so short that it annoyed me.

This book had a lot of potential and sadly, it fell short.

A big thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the advanced copy. This review is my opinion.