*** Listen to an audio excerpt of Beastly Beauty read by Steve West! ***

A gender-swapped retelling of Beauty and the Beast from the bestselling author of Stepsister and Poisoned.

The Story

What makes a girl “beastly?” Is it having too much ambition? Being too proud? Taking up too much space? Or is it just wanting something, anything, too badly?

That’s the problem Arabella faces when she makes her debut in society. Her parents want her to be sweet and compliant so she can marry well, but try as she might, Arabella can’t extinguish the fire burning inside her — the source of her deepest wishes, her wildest dreams.

When an attempt to suppress her emotions tragically backfires, a mysterious figure punishes Arabella with a curse, dooming her and everyone she cares about, trapping them in the castle. As the years pass, Arabella abandons hope. The curse is her fault — after all, there’s nothing more “beastly” than a girl who expresses her anger — and the only way to break it is to find a boy who loves her for her true self: a cruel task for a girl who’s been told she’s impossible to love.

When a handsome thief named Beau makes his way into the castle, the captive servants are thrilled, convinced he is the one to break the curse. But Beau — spooked by the castle’s strange and forbidding ladies-in-waiting, and by the malevolent presence that stalks its corridors at night — only wants to escape. He learned long ago that love is only an illusion. If Beau and Arabella have any hope of breaking the curse, they must learn to trust their wounded hearts, and realize that the cruelest prisons of all are the ones we build for ourselves.

The Inspiration

Beauty and the Beast is a deep, rich, complicated fairytale, and I’ve always wanted to flip its script and see what happens. In the classic version, the beast calls the shots. He rages and yells and breaks things and takes prisoners. And Beauty has to accommodate him. She has to work to understand him, and ultimately help him reveal his better self.

Well, enough of that.

I reversed the story’s power dynamic and wrote the Beast as a woman and Beauty as a man, and ended up with two difficult, flawed creatures who are both angry and wary and in a good deal of emotional pain, and then I watched them as they worked upon each other, got under each other’s skin, or fur, to reveal—and hopefully heal—the wounds beneath that pain.

Beastly Beauty is a story about two damaged people learning to love and forgive, but it’s also about how we all get trapped in prisons of our own making – and how we need to learn how to tear down walls and build bridges if we’re ever going to escape from those prisons.

And that’s the big takeaway from this story—that we all ultimately hold the key to our freedom and happiness in our own hands, and that no Beast or Beauty or King or Princess can save us or doom us because we, ourselves, each and every one of us – we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.