Review: Gilded Ashes by Rosamund Hodge

Gilded Ashes (A Cruel Beauty Novella)
By: Rosamund Hodge
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
ASIN: B00BEFTQN2

Review:

Once a beloved only daughter, following her father's remarriage and subsequent death Maia has remained in her stepmother's household, despite being relegated to the status of a servant, subject to the whims of her stepfamily. Though an outsider in her own home, taken advantage of and abused, Maia remained, for she'd learned the price of her tears was too great for anyone else to pay. For Maia has an avenger, a guardian angel, if you will -- the ghostly spirit of her beloved mother, residing in the tree that they once played under when Maia was a child. If Maia's mother thinks she is anything less than perfectly happy, she unleashes the demons under her thrall to drive any who cross her daughter insane. What was once a love that Maia cherished has now become her prison...and so she bites her tongue and buries her true feelings, until she's forgotten the luxury of speaking the truth.

When Lord Anax, son and heir to the Duke of Sardis, announces that he will finally take a bride, Maia sees a golden opportunity to save her family from the threat of her mother's capricious moods. She agrees to act as her stepsister Kore's proxy, delivering her letters to Anax and securing his agreement to their marriage. But Maia never counted on finding a kindred spirit in the Duke's son, one who has been as burned by love as she. As she delivers a new letter each day, she finds herself leaving a little piece of her heart with Anax, until she realizes she's stumbled into the greatest danger of all -- for if she cannot sever her fledgling bond with Lord Anax, she may lose more than her stepfamily to her mother's wrath -- she might lose the hope Anax has given her for a future free from fear.

Since falling in love with Rosamund Hodge's debut novel, Cruel Beauty -- a heady mix of fairy tale and Greek mythology -- I've been eagerly anticipating her take on the Cinderella story. Set within the same world as Cruel Beauty -- Arcadia, ruled by the deal-making Gentle Lord, prince of demons -- Gilded Ashes reinvents the Cinderella story, blending her world of demons and dangerous bargains with the Brothers Grimm story of Aschenputtel.

In a world where Disney's take on classic fairy tales has become accepted as a societal norm, it's easy to forget that that the original stories were bloody and violent, pulling no punches, refusing to deliver a romanticized version of the world in which these timeless characters lived. Reconciling Aschenputtel with Disney is a particularly good illustration of this disparity in Cinderella retellings, for the Brothers Grimm filled their story with a ghostly mother, stepsisters who self-mutilated, and the doves who later punished them for their misdeeds by plucking out their eyes.

Hodge doesn't go quite *that* far, but she restores the tension to the story, raising the stakes for her Cinderella and transforming the tropes of the classic fairy tale into a gorgeous examination of guilt, loss, and love. Here, the mother's ghost is absolutely TERRIFYING (why did I never realize this before?), a powerful catalyst for Maia's transformation from servant shackled by her circumstances to a woman embracing the chance to face world and the uncertainties of the future on her own terms -- but only if she's willing to let go of the past. Within eighty short pages, Hodge crafts a wonderfully believable romance, but even better, redeems Maia's stepfamily from the status of mere villains to fully realized characters, individuals every bit as broken and in need of love as Maia.

Gilded Ashes is a haunting, wonderfully creative Cinderella retelling, cementing Ms. Hodge as a YA author to watch. Rich in mystery, romance, and spine-tingling chills, this is the best kind of novella -- one a fully-realized and satisfying whole on its own, but that leaves you desperately wanting more. A gorgeous tale, beautifully told -- I can't wait for Ms. Hodge's next book!

About the book:

A romantic reimagining of the classic Cinderella fairy tale, Gilded Ashes is a novella by Rosamund Hodge set in the same world as her debut novel, Cruel Beauty.

Maia doesn't see the point of love when it only brings people pain: her dead mother haunts anyone who hurts Maia, and her stepsisters are desperate for their mother's approval, even though she despises them.

Meanwhile, Anax, heir to the Duke of Sardis, doesn't believe in love either—not since he discovered that his childhood sweetheart was only using him for his noble title. But when Maia's and Anax's paths cross before the royal ball, they discover that love might not be the curse they once thought. And it might even be the one thing that can save them both.

Fantasy fans who love Kristin Cashore and Rae Carson will find everything they're looking for in this extraordinary and romantic novella.

Review: Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge

Cruel Beauty
By: Rosamund Hodge
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
ASIN: B00DB365MK

Review:

Nyx Triskelion was raised to die. From childhood she's known that she was designed and trained to be the instrument of her father's vengeance against the Gentle Lord that held all of Arcadia in an iron grip -- she was not worth saving; rather, she was the necessary sacrifice. For over nine hundred years Arcadia has been isolated from the rest of the world, suffering under the rule of the Gentle Lord, a prince of demons who makes bargains with his vassals -- bargains that always exact a costly and oft-times unexpected price, as when Nyx's father begged on behalf of his wife for children, only to see his wife die in childbirth with a future forfeit to come -- a daughter given in marriage to the feared lord. As a daughter of a famed scholar and leader of the Resurgandi, an organization ostensibly founded to further Hermetic research (the study of the power of the four elements of earth, wind, air, and fire), but whose true goal was to undo the sundering and destroy the Gentle Lord, Nyx was raised as a sacrifice. Robbed of her future because of her father's folly, Nyx is tasked with destroying the Gentle Lord, knowing her life is a sure forfeit in the process.

When her seventeenth birthday arrives, Nyx is married by proxy to the Gentle Lord and deposited at the door of the crumbling castle that is his home. But her husband is not the demon she was raised to expect. Handsome and yes, even kind, with a smile that makes her heart skip a beat, rather than demand the intimacy of the marriage bed, he grants Nyx the freedom of the house. And most shockingly of all, rather than punish her for her spirit and her desire to rid the land of his presence, he seems to relish her spirit and applaud her honesty, rewarding her with a tantalizing promise -- every night she will receive the chance to guess his name. Guess correctly, and she wins her freedom -- but given the wrong answer, and she'll lose her life, joining the eight previous wives who risked it all and lost. The longer Nyx dwells in Ignifex's enchanted home, and the more she learns about the power that he wields over all of Arcadia, she begins to wonder if Ignifex is as much a captive as her, held in thrall to forces more powerful than she ever imagined. When the monster this beauty has been raised to loathe, raised to kill, begins to capture her heart, Nyx struggles between keeping her vow and freeing her people, or risking everything to save the demon lord who has captured her heart.

I must confess, what first drew me to Rosamund Hodge's debut was not the promise of a fresh re-imagining of Beauty and the Beast, one of my favorite fairy tales, but its gorgeously-designed cover. And having finished Cruel Beauty I love its cover even more, for it is the rare design that perfectly captures the spirit of the novel it represents, a pitch-perfect imagining of the essence of Hodge's darkly beautiful, twisty take on a tale as old as time. But more than a straight Beauty and the Beast re-telling, Hodge takes her story's inspiration from Greek mythology, specifically the Cupid and Psyche legend. In this respect Cruel Beauty is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's classic Till We Have Faces, which told the Cupid and Psyche tale through the lens of Psyche's embittered older sister, Orual. Hodge skilfully blends the tropes of both tales, bringing her own unique and enthralling vision to life on the page.

This may sound strange, but what I think I loved most about this story is just how angry Nyx is throughout, struggling to reconcile her fate with her own thwarted desires, disappointments, and family betrayals. There is something so refreshingly honest in having a "Beauty" who resents her role as the family's savior, who struggles with the uglier aspects of her personality, sure that the fact of their very existence precludes her from any happy ending of her own, even as she rails against those that demand she sacrifice everything. But even as Nyx struggles to reconcile the light and dark facets of her own personality, in her husband's household she is drawn to the cunning and handsome Ignifex and the sacrificial and kind Shade, her husband's shadow that shares his form but appears to be the complete opposite of his personality. In being drawn to both men -- sure she isn't worthy of Shade, and just as sure she is worthy of being damned for wanting Ignifex's kisses.

Nyx embodies the struggle of being vulnerable enough to love and be loved, of grappling with selflessness, and of buying into the lie that one's own failings can preclude even the possibility of love and acceptance -- but the possibility is tantalizing, as Nyx beautifully states, wanting to "lose myself in the embrace of the one person who had ever seen my heart and claimed to love me after." Cruel Beauty is a gorgeous rendering of the redemptive power of sacrificial love, freely given, and its power to utterly transform the lives of both the giver and receiver. Only when all seems lost do Nyx and Ignifex learn the power of "a handful of kindess," of grace freely given. Only then does a beauty's heart save a beast, but here the beast's heart saves the beauty as well, and that beautifully illustrated reciprocity elevates Hodge's debut from something ordinary to the sublime.

With her stunning debut Hodge delivers a thought-provoking, lushly-realized fantasy, a gorgeous re-telling of a classic, perfect for fans of Robin McKinley's prose. Pacing-wise the beginning of the novel felt a bit sluggish, as the copious amounts of information necessary to understand the mechanics of Nyx's world are revealed, but that issue is quickly overcome as I found myself lost in Hodge's opulent world-building, rich prose, and heartfelt characterizations. Cruel Beauty is a novel to savor and marks Hodge as an author to watch, and I for one cannot wait to see which tale she brings to life, stamped with her unique vision, next!

About the book:

Since birth, Nyx has been betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom—all because of a reckless bargain her father struck. And since birth, she has been training to kill him.

Betrayed by her family yet bound to obey, Nyx rails against her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, she abandons everything she's ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, disarm him, and break the nine-hundred-year-old curse he put on her people.

But Ignifex is not what Nyx expected. The strangely charming lord beguiles her, and his castle—a shifting maze of magical rooms—enthralls her. As Nyx searches for a way to free her homeland by uncovering Ignifex's secrets, she finds herself unwillingly drawn to him. But even if she can bring herself to love her sworn enemy, how can she refuse her duty to kill him?

Based on the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Cruel Beauty is a dazzling love story about our deepest desires and their power to change our destiny.