Book Review - 'Hunted' by Meagan Spooner

I’m pleased to say, I’ve started on the reading list I posted last week!

It’s been a while since I’ve done a book review, and I was dithering over whether to do one for ‘Hunted’ as the book came out in 2017. But, why not? If all goes well, I hope to review each of the books I read.

‘Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones – and in her blood.
She knows that the forest holds secrets and that her father is the only hunter who’s ever come close to discovering them.
But Yeva’s grown up far from her father’s old lodge, raised to be part of the city’s highest caste of aristocrats. Still, she’s never forgotten the feel of a bow in her hands, and she’s spent a lifetime longing for the freedom of the hunt.
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 heard about only in fairy tales. A world that can bring her ruin – or salvation.
Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast?’

This is the first book I’ve read by Meagan Spooner. It’s been on my TBR pile for well over a year. I’ve been putting off reading it because I thought it would be a really good retelling of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, set in a world similar to medieval Russia. I have this strange habit of postponing reading books I think/hope I’ll enjoy because once I’ve read it, that feeling of discovering it for the first time will have gone.

The plot is very similar to the original, and by ‘original’, I mean the one written by the French novelist, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, and published in 1740.

In ‘Hunted’, the father, Tvertko, is widowed and has three daughters, Lena, Asenka and Yeva, or Beauty as her father had named her when she was little. Although the youngest, Yeva is lucky enough to be part of the baronessa’s inner circle, but secretly she yearns for the freedom she had when she was younger, when her father taught her to hunt and allowed her to accompany him.

Unfortunately, Tvertko had invested his entire fortune in a risky venture, which fails, and the family are left destitute. They’re forced to leave their comfortable home in town and live in his old hunting lodge, far from civilisation and close to the forest. He resumes his old life as a hunter to provide for his daughters. However, it isn’t long before he becomes obsessed with hunting a creature that repeatedly eludes him.

When he fails to return home, Yeva insists on trying to find him. In the course of her search, she comes across what she believes is the creature her father had been hunting. Before she can exact her revenge, the creature, the beast, captures her, keeping her alive as he requires her skills.

From there, the plot basically follows the original, with a few interesting additions, like a smattering of Russian fairy tales, namely, ‘Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird and the Grey Wolf’, and a few mythical/fairy tale-like creatures.

The writing was easy to read, the sort that doesn’t get in the way of the story, if you get my meaning. There aren’t any scenes or descriptions that might be considered worthy of trigger warnings; Yeva’s treatment as a captive is, for the most part, left to the imagination.

The story is told in third person, except for the Beast’s snippets, almost like diary entries, for want of a better description, which are in first person, from the Beast’s point of view.

The dynamic I enjoyed most in the book was the relationship between the sisters. For once, there was no jealousy or spite. The three girls genuinely loved and cared for one another, wanting only the best for each other. Asenka is the sweetest of the three, willing to forgo her own happiness for her sisters, but she does not come across as a martyr.

During her time with the baronessa, Yeva unknowingly catches the eye of the baron’s heir, Solmir. His character is another breath of fresh air, a love interest who’s not one extreme or the other; he’s not a macho hero-type, neither is he a limp biscuit.

He’s earnest in his declaration of his feelings towards Yeva but never creepy or stifling with it. He, also, is a hunter and it’s Yeva’s skill as a hunter that sparked his initial interest.

‘Yeva would have preferred to be admired for her skill, but she’d suffered the great misfortune of having been born a girl. And so no one would ever know. When she was younger, she used to dream of a husband who would love her all the more if she could hunt with him, side by side… Solmir is a hunter… And a good one. If anyone were to admire [her] skill in the forest, it would be him…’

Yet, when Solmir offers her the freedom she believes she wants, to hunt side by side with him – ‘of all the men in the world who might ask for her hand, she could not hope to find someone more suited for her than this one’ – she can’t accept because, in that moment, she knows she can’t marry anyone.

I know, this being a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ retelling, that the two principal characters will end up together. But, honestly, I was hoping, at the end of it all, Yeva would choose Solmir. He proves himself a man of his word and is someone Yeva and her sisters can rely on.

Well, I guess I’ve put it off long enough. The central characters – Yeva and the Beast. You have no idea how much I wanted to like them, to root for them. Strangely, though, I was left feeling… underwhelmed. I honestly found them more interesting before they met.

Once the family were living in the forest, Yeva comes across as more selfish than anything else. I understand her wanting to find her father, but I struggled with her leaving her sisters, knowing neither of them could hunt. And leaving them with the added worry for their sister.

I couldn’t get a handle on what the Beast looked like, but that’s probably just me. His treatment of Yeva after he captures her borders on brutal until she’s allowed more freedom in his castle. Once he was interacting with her, I no longer felt he was the scary beast of earlier.

One of the parts I enjoyed was when Yeva speaks of the fairy tales her father used to tell her. After one particular tale, I started to work out where the story was going.

For me, the scenes with Yeva and the Beast had no chemistry, even as the story got nearer the end. I didn’t feel any tension, any sense of danger, nothing. The ending felt rushed and was, for me, anti-climactic. It also left one big question about the curse unanswered.

There were a few inconsistencies, the most glaring one concerning Yeva’s dog, her hunting companion with (for me) the unfortunate name of Doe-Eyes. We’re told, repeatedly, that Doe-Eyes is a ‘slim dog, bred for far warmer climes…’ If she ‘tried to wade shoulder-high all day long [through heavy snow], she’d risk frostbite or worse.’ When Yeva leaves to search for her father before becoming the Beast’s captive, she leaves Doe-Eyes behind, knowing the dog won’t survive the snow and bitter cold. Yet, somehow, despite the unrelenting weather, Doe-Eyes manages to find Yeva weeks later, ‘in the kind of snow and cold she was not bred to withstand.’ Apart from the freezing cold, how did the dog manage to trek her through the snow?

Speaking of snow, my other gripe is the worldbuilding. If snow, snow and more snow can be counted as worldbuilding, then there’s plenty of that going on. At first, I thought the world had been inspired by medieval Russia until I came across the word ‘Rus’, which made me think it’s set somewhere in what is now modern-day Russia. There’s the mention of their father having sent his caravan to Constantinople, and the Mongols preventing them making outside contact. I guess the time period must be around the 13th century when the Mongol empire covered a vast region. But we’re not given anything else. With the constant snowfall, everything came across as ‘the same’.

There’s no sense of how much time passes in the story. After Yeva is captured and imprisoned, a few pages later, we’re told ‘for the first time in weeks’… Followed, some pages later, by ‘the strain of drawing her father’s heavy bow day after day…’ With nothing but snow falling and only being told that days and weeks are passing, I felt as if the developments between Yeva and the Beast were happening over too short a time.

Then there’s the vast collection of books in this story. Yeva’s father ‘owned over a dozen books’, which they’d had to sell; the Beast’s castle has a library, ‘the walls, each one lined with shelves and each one full of leather-bound books, at least a hundred books…’; including a separate collection in another room, ‘the leather of these spines was bright with colour, showing the original dyes, and their titles were stamped deep… maybe thirty or forty of them…’

This may come across as nit-picking, but books as we know them didn’t exist in the 13th century. The books that were around then were mainly religious texts, not stories and fairy tales. Printing with movable type didn’t come about in Europe until the 15th century. And only the exceptionally wealthy had private collections; even then, their collections consisted of books on law and medicine, herbals and devotional works.

If the story had moved along at a fair pace, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed these things. But, once Yeva had become the Beast’s captive, the story slowed right down to a crawl with nothing much happening. To be totally honest, I got bored.

I’m so disappointed this book wasn’t what I hoped it would be. I think it could have been so much more, the idea is so good, yet the execution left a lot to be desired.

I won’t say, don’t read it. By all means, do. Who knows? You may really enjoy it.