Title: Beast
Author: Donna Jo Napoli
Publish Date: 2000

There are a lot of retellings of "Beauty and the Beast" out there, some more original than others, but almost all of them from Beauty's POV. Beast is, I think, the first book I've read to take the other perspective. That alone bumps it up above the "meh" rating I'd probably give it otherwise.

Orasmyn, Prince of Persia, is a pretty nice guy. He's an observant Muslim, who takes his religious and secular duties seriously. He likes roses, sweets, and poetry, and is kind of a wuss when it comes to blood; in unrelated news, strangely enough, he isn't married yet. As the story opens he's preparing to take part in the Feast of Sacrifices.

Long story short, he screws up the sacrifice in such a way that nobody notices — except a spirit called a pari, or fairy. You see where this is going: courtesy of the pissed-off pari, Orasmyn becomes a lion.

This is the other thing I like about Napoli's take on the story: the realism. Magic transformations aside, nothing in Beast is overtly fantastic, which makes the impact much stronger. The pari doesn't turn Orasmyn into one of those wacky, and conveniently bipedal, compound critters we all know from picture books; he's a plain old garden-variety lion, one hundred percent beast, with all that implies. The castle in France where he eventually settles has no invisible servants; the roses in his garden have no nifty teleportation properties.

Which just makes the whole thing stranger and more compelling. After all, what's more bizarre: a reclusive prince who just happens to have a pig's head and a tail, or a genuine lion living by himself in southern France, trying to make a livable human residence despite his lack of opposable thumbs? What's more traumatic, waking up ugly, or waking up as a completely different species, with a body that works differently and has different biological urges than your own?

I do have a few complaints. For one thing, Napoli's habit of strewing her prose with Arabic and Farsi and then translating the words individually — especially in the first half of the book — is really damned distracting. It's a tendency I've noticed especially in YA fiction — as if teens are too lazy to flip to the glossary and too dumb to realize that This Are Furren Country unless you throw Furren Words at them, let alone figure out what a chador or a château are from context. Rule of thumb: if there's an English word for it, use the English word. Save the vocabulary dump for things that are actually culture-specific.

Second, a couple of things are never made clear, like why the pari cares so much about Orasmyn's screwup. Finally, I wasn't sold on Belle. She's a sympathetic character, certainly; I like her middle-class practicality. But she doesn't strike me either as being especially lovable or — perhaps more importantly — as caring all that deeply about Orasmyn.

So I'd say Beast is a decent book, made good by virtue of sheer originality, but not great.

Rating: 7/10