Retellings of classic stories can sometimes go painfully wrong. Sometimes, the readers who hold some of these classic stories to heart would prefer writers to leave them intact, or in what we consider to be their already perfect form. Fortunately, once in a while, a writer like Brigid Kemmerer comes along with a story that restores our hope in classic retellings, which is the case for Kemmerer’s newest novel, A Curse So Dark and Lonely, a retelling of the well-known Beauty and the Beast.
In this particular retelling, Kemmerer introduces us to Prince Rhen, the regent Prince of Emberfall — a land existing in a world seemingly parallel to ours. On his 18th birthday, an evil enchantress imposes a curse that forces Rhen to physically change into a beast that ravages and destroys everyone and everything around him. The spell can only be broken after — you guessed it — a girl has fallen in love with Rhen. Enter Harper, a teenage girl living in Washington D.C., and doing her best to survive on a day-to-day basis. Life has not been easy for Harper: she lives with cerebral palsy; her father abandoned their family; her mother is dying of cancer, and her brother’s been left to pick up the pieces of the broken, precarious life her father has left behind. Despite these hardships, Harper is resilient, spunky, and refuses to let anyone take advantage of her or those around her.
Out on an illicit job with her brother on a cold night in D.C., Harper encounters Rhen’s commanding officer Grey out in her world to procure a potential curse-breaking girl for the Prince. The circumstances of their storylines merge, bringing them to the same place and the same time, and so Harper ends up accidentally being dragged through a portal into Emberfall.
Once in Emberfall, Harper grows close to both Rhen and Grey, as well as the subjects of the cursed land. She unintentionally becomes deeply involved in a narrative bigger than herself. Rhen needs her to help him break the curse and save his country. Although Harper wants to help in whatever way she can, she also struggles with her need to go back home and help her family.
Thus, in a Curse So Dark and Lonely, the groundwork originally presented to us in Beauty and the Beast remains the same. The hook of this modern retelling is in Kemmerer’s expansion on a story that we’re all familiar with. She fills in gaps in the narrative so that we can better understand the events that transpired leading to Rhen’s curse.
For starters, Rhen has a background story. He has a family: parents, sisters, past lovers — a whole history of his own before we come to know him. We learn about the conspiracies of his predecessors — the sins that led to the curse placed on him as a form of retaliation by the magesmiths. In the original story, so little is known about the cursed prince that the reader must do most of the work themselves to fill in the blanks.
Harper, as well, is like Belle 2.0. She’s stubborn, determined and a force to be reckoned with. She’s less bookish and sometimes too headstrong, but she possesses a heart of gold that desperately seeks to protect everyone it comes in close contact with.
The most important message in Beauty and the Beast has always been that true beauty lies on the inside. Furthermore, it’s also taught us that people can change if given the chance. It’s always been a story about forgiveness and seeing the better sides of people, especially when they can’t see it in themselves. Kemmerer has tactfully left this as the heart of the story. She’s very carefully woven her own ideas around an existing work of art and simply helped bring us more of what was already good. A Curse So Dark and Lonely is an excellent example of how a writer can take an existing classic and make it completely their own without erasing its unique thumbprint.