By Jasmine Guillory

I had known that this was a modern day retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but hadn’t realized that it was explicitly Disney, like from a Disney imprint. I’m not a Disney adult (I wasn’t even that much of a Disney kid), so even the relatively subtle allusions to Mrs. Potts and Lumière made me roll my eyes. Despite myself, though, I found myself charmed—Guillory’s skill with characters kept me wanting to know what happened next.

Protagonist Isabelle (goes by Izzy, not Belle) is working in her first career job as an editorial assistant at Tale as Old as Time publishing house (sigh), and facing the disillusionment with her dreams that I assume most of us do in our mid-20s. In a somewhat desperate (and tipsy) attempt to gain favor with her harsh boss and to rekindle her passion for publishing, she offers to coax a much belated manuscript out of child-actor-turned-messy-adult, Beau.

Beau, of course, lives in a beautiful, huge house with extended gardens (and essential large library) in semi-isolation as he struggles with severe writer’s block. He is rude and somewhat mocking to Izzy at first, but nothing egregious. It’s a tricky thing to write a “beast” who is sufficiently off-putting but not abusive, and I don’t have any solutions to that, but Beau felt mild enough that I struggled to fully empathize with Izzy’s antagonism. He seemed like kind of a dick, Izzy on her last thread of patience, and I would have shrugged them both off.

However, once they found a level of friendship working on Beau’s manuscript, I was much more interested in the process by which Izzy talks Beau into overcoming his fear of the blank page, something I assume Guillory has her own vast experience with. Of course, the end got more romantic (though stayed pretty solidly PG with all sex happening off page) and less about the publishing world, so I was less into it, but it did all wrap up very satisfyingly, maybe even a little too pat, though that is to be expected with fairy tales, right?