Beast [Audio Cassette]

Judith Ivory (Author), Barbara Rosenblat (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2001

UNABRIDGED 9 cassettes

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Recorded Books (2001)
• ISBN-10: 0788760890
• ISBN-13: 978-0788760891
• Product Dimensions: 13.4 x 7.8 x 3.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,116,336 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lulu and her Pasha...( 4 1/2 stars), January 4, 2005

By 

M. I. "krushedvelvet" (Old Bridge, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Beast (Avon Romantic Treasure) (Mass Market Paperback)

Louise Vandermeer is beautiful. Beautiful and bored with it. Bored with her beauty, bored with her life...Until her well-meaning parents put her on a ship bound for France where she will meet the man that she has been promised to - Charles d'Harcourt. Louise has never even seen Charles - she doesnt want to. She has absolutely no interest in the arranged marriage, but has given into her parents wishes...still, Louise cant help but be intrigued when she meets a mysterious man aboard the ship. A man that she meets only in the dark. Louise is swept away by him as he becomes her first lover, though he never permits her to look upon his face. For Louise, who has always used her beauty as a crutch, this time in the dark is a real awakening...she feels she can finally be herself and she falls hard for her mystery man.

Charles d'Harcourt never intended to lie. But when he stumbles upon his intended bride and gets a good look at her without her knowledge and overhears her less than complimentary opinion of him - without having met him - well, he devises a plan to teach the young girl a lesson. He will trick her...Louise has no idea that Charles is on the very same ship...so, he approaches her in the dark. His plan is to seduce her and reveal himself only once he is sure that she has fallen for him and expose her true shallow nature. But as Charles spends more time with Louise and she opens up to him, he finds himself the butt of his own joke...he has fallen in love with his own fiance.

"Beast" was a GREAT book. Yet again, Ivory is brilliant. Book after book, I am seeing a pattern...her heroes are UNBELIEVABLE. I love EVERY one of them! Charles was no exception. He had such a fantastic mixture of confidence and insecurity. He saw Louises beauty, but he really did love her for HER...he was so able to look beyond her face and I adored him for it. Louise was very flawed, very human...I loved her, I hated her. No other author can write a character like Ivory IMO. Im telling you, the woman is brilliant.

My only complaint with this book was that I found the beginning a little too slow and the ending a little too fast...because of this, I knocked off half a star, but everything in between was exquisite. If you have never read Judith Ivory, you should really give her a try. As for "Beast"...a keeper for sure.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An honest and wonderful romance, April 8, 2005

By 

C.D. (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beast (Avon Romantic Treasure) (Mass Market Paperback)

People tend to feel strongly about Ivory's work, one way or the other, and Beast will be no exception. Be prepared to really think, even long after you set the book down. Set in the early 1900's on both a luxury oceanliner and Mediterranean France, Beast stars the disfiguered, Charles (who lives in a state of semi-self-denyal about his looks) and Louise (Lulu), who is eighteen and acts it. Louise is beautiful to mythic heights and rich beyond belief, but instead of acting like so many romance novel heroines (Snow White and Mother Theresa rolled into one), she acts like any gorgeous, wealthy, eighteen year old might act. She flirts with handsome young men, she loves jewelery and rich foods, and she doesn't fall instantly in love with her tragic prince. At least, she doesn't think so. And despite her stunning beauty, Louise finds herself wishing she weren't always judged by it, and wondering if she has anything of worth to offer besides the physical.

I've read reviews by readers who thought Louise was cold and calculating, some who called her an outright witch, but I found her refreshingly real. She tries very hard to put her heart into being "good" and doing "what's right", and grows up quite a bit by the end of the book. Charles, I have to love because his motives are truly all out of self-preseration. Surrounded by mirrors, he doesn't really *see* himself until the end of the book. This is a wonderful character study of two people who loathe being judged by outward appearances, and it produces interesting results.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This was a first..., March 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Beast (Avon Romantic Treasure) (Mass Market Paperback)

... and perhaps also the last I'll read by Judith Ivory. I'd heard great things about this book, so I made sure to buy it. This is also a first in that I couldn't stand either the hero or the heroine. Ivory tried to make Charles' vanity endearing... I found it repugnant because he does not try (at least try!) to rise above it. Ivory didn't even do that much for Louise. She was vain and proud of it, certain she deserved only the most attractive physical specimen the world had to offer. Both Charles and Louise were also petty and selfish. Louise was a spoiled teenager and so was Charles at heart. Maybe the two deserved each other, but I definitely didn't want to read about it.

Beyond that, the plot was stilted and boring. We never find out how Charles happened to get on the exact same ship as Louise, or when he agreed to her parents' proposal of marriage to their daughter. It was annoying to have the story interrupted by so many parenthetical comments by Ivory. Did we really need to interrupt the story with a parenthetical aside to find out that Charles' stateroom could fit fifty or sixty people? Couldn't we assume that a French prince would travel luxuriously? And what was the point of all those excerpts from Charles' writing on ambergris? It's the same technique that Jayne Ann Krentz has used in some of her novels. Whichever one of them came up with it, it's something I'd rather not see spread, as it does nothing for the story.

All in all, BEAST was a terrible disappointment. Since I guess it's really not fair to judge an author on the basis of just one book, I may give Ivory a second chance, but it will be awhile before I do.