7 hours 21 minutes | Quirk Books | Contemporary YA | 8/4/2020
This was such a clever retelling of Beauty in the Beast.
Bookish high school senior Rosie Thorne inherited her love of the Starfield franchise from her mother. Little does she know Vance Reigns–the bad-boy star of the Starfield movie– has been banished to her backwoods North Carolina town until his 18th birthday.
When Rosie accidentally ruins a book in the library she agrees to catalog the house’s massive science fiction library. Vance brings the expected grumpy broodiness from the Beast archetype but he’s also just kind of full of regret -much like the Beast in the Disney movie.
This is is the third book in the Once Upon A Con series but each book takes place a year apart so, while there are some cameos and references, I think it can be read as a standalone.
I did a lot of this on audio. Narrator Caitlin Kelly is one of my favorites and the main reason I picked this up. She has such a great YA voice and range of characters. This was my first time hearing Curry Whitmire–he does a great British teenager even though I think he’s American. However, I found it so odd that they pronounced Vance Reigns’ last name with a hard “G”. I have never heard of this pronunciation.
