Customer Reviews

Beast

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

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.

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.

... 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.

Judith Ivory (who has also written as Judy Cuevas) outdid herself with this one. BEAST is both dark and humorous, erotic and sophisticated. It is also absolutely original. To give just one example, it's the first romance I've read where the age gap between the hero and heroine, so typical in romances, actually creates a stumbling block for the hero.

Ivory's prose is far above that of most writers in the romance genre. Her rich language and characterizations are comparable only with Laura Kinsale's and Patricia Gaffney's, but her books are unlike anyone else's.

BEAST is her best by far. My second favorite of hers is DANCE, written under the name Judy Cuevas.

I have now read all three of Ms. Ivory's books, and I'm totally impressed. Her books are intelligent (not a common acholade for this genre), entertaining, and convincing. The situation where the hero paints himself into a corner through his own "cleverness" is terrific, and the heroine's faithfulness to her "mystery" lover is perfect irony, and there's the bonus of Ms. Ivory's prose, which is almost lyrical.

(...)

This book left me frustrated in so many ways, I'm not sure where to begin. Unlike most of the reviewers here, I preferred the second half of the book to the first because I almost couldn't stand reading what seemed an unending account of Louise falling in love with part lie part self-created fantasy. Some may have thought it romantic that she never saw Charles and yet fell for him, but given that this is a girl bored with life, it seemed she fell for the slightly forbidden idea of sex with a foreigner as well as someone who didn't seem to care that much about her appearances, the latter being especially untrue given Charles' constant and tiresome adoration of Louise's beauty. Hey, it's nice to know the hero thinks the heroine is pretty, but especially since the whole point of this book was supposed to be about looking beyond the outer facade, I could have done with about 20 *less* pages devoted to worshipping Louise's physical perfection.

My next big problem with this book was that it wasted so many pages on verbose descriptions of settings and Louise's glowing skin, and hastily skimmed over all the parts that really needed more attention:
1. After Charles and Louise are married, things are tense between them, mostly because Louise finds Charles hideous. Charles is restricted to kissing Louise's glorious wrists--but not too many times or he'll get a whack with her trusty fan. Then suddenly, out of the blue, in a scene on the beach, Louise admits that she is "fond of his appearance" and thinks she might even love Charles. Huh? When did that happen? Maybe time has passed and things have happened that the reader is not privvy to, but I thought the whole point of a love story is to *show* two people falling in love, not tell us after it's happpened. I wanted to see Charles wooing Louise, but this time showing her every part of his true self, and I wanted to see Louise falling in love with the true Charles.

2. After discovering the truth about Charles' horrible deceit, Louise gets over it in about half a page and I couldn't believe this, especially since I could hardly come to grips with the fact that Louise was suddenly in love with Charles again.

3. It is implied that Louise is intelligent, and what's more, she's desperate to find herself, to find worth in her life. But the author never gives her a chance, never allows her any satisfaction. The book ends with her still without any interests or passions, any desire to do anything. Charles in fact offers her a chance to try to apply herself, first as his accountant and then, at her request, as some kind of chemist creating artificial scents--she gives up quickly on both. The beginning of the book explains that Charles' dream is to come up with his own special perfume and I thought perhaps Louise and Charles could have worked together toward this, but this dream of Charles is left unfinished, not even begun really. While poor Louise never even finds a dream of her own.

Somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean 1902 - This was not your usual historical romance and in the opening chapters you will definitely meet the beast or more accurately Charles Harcourt, Prince de Harcourt. The opening chapters find him acting quite the scoundrel as he informs his sexual partner, the married wife of a French diplomat, that he would be getting married  and that the bride to be was on the same ship - ostensibly on her way, with members of her family, to meet him in Marseilles. Tossed naked out of his stateroom by his paramour, he accidentally witnesses his affianced bride cavorting with one of the ships crew and decides to get to know this little beauty after eavesdropping and hearing himself described in less than glowing terms because of a disfigurement and lameness injury. Not wanting the very beautiful young Louise Vandermeer, to recognize him, he baits and seduces her letting her think he is an Arab sheik  never letting her see him  always under the cover of darkness. Unfortunately, Louise falls deeply in love with her phantom lover, and Charles, once he gets to know the real Louise finds himself falling deeply in love.

The dilemma of course, is now the 18-year-old Louise is no longer a virgin, and Charles, is too cowardly to admit to being her shipboard lover. Neither of these two are very endearing in the first half of the book  the older Charles acting rather beastly in seducing an 18 year old virgin  even if she was not a sweet girl and somewhat spoiled and vain of her spectacular good looks. What you do have though is a very spicy and very arousing seduction that is really rather erotic in its own way as the mature Charles unleashes the passions of his technically virgin fiancé. As with most romances, all things do work out in the end once Louise makes Charles suffer as she pines for her phantom Arab sheik. This was a pretty stimulating and amusing read.

I love Beauty and the Beast/Phantom of the Opera type romances, so this one was an automatic buy to read. This novel was also somewhat similar to Kathleen Woodiwiss' A ROSE IN WINTER. However, I preferred A ROSE IN WINTER because Woodiwiss kept the identity of the husband and secret lover (and naive young thing I was at the time, I actually did think they were two separate men when I read the book). Perhaps Louise comes off as more spoiled and silly because we are on the side of Charles, so we know what is going on which it makes it harder to identify with her. So many people in the previous reviews ranted about her behavior, but I wonder if Charles' joke on her was any more acceptable really. Both of them were equally stupid when it came to starting off the marriage on the right foot.

However, character flaws aside, I did enjoy the dialogue of the characters. And I thought Charles Harcourt was fascinating for a romantic hero. I agree that once they get off the boat and face reality, the book slows down and becomes predictable and all I could do was wait for the secret to be revealed. Perhaps part of my impatience with this section of the book also concerns that I really don't like marriage-for-convenience stories. Maybe because I've read so many over the years, and they're never really new, just the characters' names change. A physically disabled romantic hero is at least a new slant on things from the typical romance, but the marriage-for-convenience stuff bores me belong belief.

It was a good book, but with the interesting beginning, it could have been better throughout.

I read a lot of romance, partly because of my profession, but mostly because I never grow tired of reading a fabulous, sensual love story. For me, BEAST is just such a book and on a very short list of my all-time favorite romances. The hero's insecurity and vulnerability--which causes him to pretend to be someone he is not, and in the process find himself almost becoming an invented person. The heroine's immaturity in the beginning, so that she would disdain a man based on his appearance, only to discover that he's much more than she sees on the surface. It's a classic theme, but in Ivory's hands becomes fresh and new all over again. The woman is a master storyteller, and one of the best romance authors writing today. I will never give my well-worn, very loved copy of this book away!

Beauty and the Beast has long been my favourite fairy tale -- still, I was curious to know how Ms. Ivory could possibly put the magic into a story told and re-told in such endless and varied combinations. Yet she wove the tale of Charles and Louise with such skill and insight I was caught up in the "magic" from page one. Of particular interest to me was her well-researched commentary on the uses of Ambergris and Jasmine, and the figurative parallellism of these essences to Charles and Louise, respectively. Clever, clever girl! Do give us another Beast like Charles d'Harcourt -- he was thoroughly, absolutely, painfully lovable.