Title: Hunted
Author: Meagan Spooner
Publication Date: Mar. 14, 2017
Find: Amazon | Goodreads
Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones—and in her blood. 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?
New York Times bestselling author Meagan Spooner grew up reading and writing every spare moment of the day, while dreaming about life as an archaeologist, a marine biologist, an astronaut. She graduated from Hamilton College in New York with a degree in playwriting, and has spent several years since then living in Australia. She’s traveled with her family all over the world to places like Egypt, South Africa, the Arctic, Greece, Antarctica, and the Galapagos, and there’s a bit of every trip in every story she writes.
She currently lives and writes in Asheville, North Carolina, but the siren call of travel is hard to resist, and there’s no telling how long she’ll stay there. She’s the author of the award-winning Starbound trilogy (These Broken Stars, This Shattered World, Their Fractured Light) and the Skylark Trilogy (Skylark, Shadowlark, Lark Ascending) as well as the upcoming Beauty and the Beast retelling Hunted.
In her spare time she plays guitar, plays video games, plays with her cat, and reads.
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Retellings are really one of my favorite “genres” to read. So, maybe they’re not an official genre. But, I am a fan, nonetheless. However, with retellings I feel like there’s no gray area; they’re either really great or they’re really awful.
Meagan Spooner’s Hunted has been on my TBR since it came out last year. I love the idea of a good Beauty and the Beast story. So, I was finally able to get a copy of Hunted when it went on sale on Amazon! And because I just couldn’t wait to read it, I started it right away and forgot for a couple of nights about all the other books that I’m supposed to be reading.
This is a pretty quick read, especially if you have more time in your day to read than I do. But, I read it in two nights and could not put it down!
This version takes place in medieval Russia, with a young girl, Yeva, her father, and two sisters. Yeva’s not a “typical” Beauty character. She’s pretty, of course… But, this Beauty also loves to hunt. I guess the free-spirited quality that we love about the traditional “Belle” still lives on, just in another way.
Yeva is quite obviously looking for something in her life. She’s just not sure what that is. Whether or not she finds it with the angry, terrifying beast…Well, you’ll have to read Hunted to find out.
Spooner is a fantastic writer. I love when an author doesn’t force pointless details down our throats, but instead allows the reader to use their imaginations. Spooner is great at this. I didn’t feel like this story was force-fed. There was just enough magic and fantasy to carry me along with Yeva and Beast to the, slightly-obscure ending.
If I did half ratings, this would be a 4.5, absolutely. The only reason for the not-perfect rating is because I would’ve liked an epilogue or maybe a little more in the final chapter. While the story did feel finished, it wasn’t quite enough to satisfy.
