Title: A Curse So Dark and Lonely
Author: Brigid Kemmerer
Rating: 5/5
Retelling of: Beauty and the Beast
The Twist: The Beast spends more time as a human man than a beast, cursed to relive the same season until he can find the girl to break his curse. Also, Beauty is an awesome, positive representation of a disabled main character – perks for disability representation!
I actually read this book for a college paper project I was working on. At the time, I was interested in representations of disability within fairy tales and fairy tale retellings. To my surprise, despite there being an enormous wealth of disability representation within original fairy tales (most of it problematic, but that is a post for another time), there is very, very little disability representation in modern, contemporary retellings.
Now, a quick caveat. I am a huge advocate for disability rights. I firmly believe that members of the disability community should have full access to all rights, services, and experiences as normative, able-bodied people do. This includes finding literature, film, video games, music, etc that positively portrays disabled characters, especially when those characters are the main protagonists. Unsurprisingly, and quite depressingly, such literature is scarce, especially in the fantasy/fairy tale/sci-fi circles. Which is why A Curse So Dark and Lonely was such a nice breath of fresh air.
Another note: I use the phrase “disabled character” as an example of disability-first language, which is often preferred by members of the disability community. I take this phrasing from an accessibility advocate in the gaming community, Clint “halfcoordinated” Lexa, who says “Disability-first is often preferred by disabled folks, and they see person-first language as a way that abled folks avoid addressing disability directly.” You can see his tweet here (along with great info about accessibility in video games). However I do know that other advocates and people with disabilities prefer person-first language. I am simply noting that I am following a disability advocate and disabled gamer’s preferences on the matter, as these preferences are clearly shared among others on social media.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at A Curse So Dark and Lonely!
The General Overview
Harper is a teenage girl with surgery-corrected cerebral palsy who lives kind of rough with her brother, who is part of a gang, and her mother, who is dying of cancer. We first see her living in Washington, D.C., serving as a lookout while her brother is off working for the gang. When she notices a strange man attempting to kidnap a woman, she immediately tries to stop the guy–only to be taken to a magical world instead.
This magical world is where the story mostly takes place. In Emberfall, magic exists, witches are real (and evil), and royalty runs the show. Or royalty would run the show if the current prince, Rhen, wasn’t cursed to relive the same few months over and over again, trying to woo one girl after another into falling in love with him before he turns into a savage beast by the end of the season. He’s already tried to woo all of the girls in Emberfall, and now has been forced to send his captain of the guard, and closest confidant, Commander Grey, to a different world (ours) to retrieve other girls. Harper ends up as the latest in a long string of girls, mostly by accident.
And she’s not excited about the prospect of being stuck in the middle of wifi-less nowhere away from her mother, who is dying, and her brother, who may be in trouble without her serving as his lookout. It takes her a minute to come to terms not only with her new surroundings, but the people who live there as well.
Gradually, though, Rhen and Harper grow to sort of like each other, especially when she begins to help his kingdom, which is being threatened by soldiers from a neighboring kingdom to the north. As they plot to build an army, Emberfall’s secrets slowly begin to come to light, and Harper’s identity as an outsider from another world nearly dooms her.
Without spoiling anything, the book ends in surprising and refreshing ways, not only calling into question the concept of “true love” as a curse cure, but also leaving enough of the ending open-ended to make you hungry for more. Which is a good thing, as Kemmerer’s sequel, A Heart So Fierce and Broken, was just released earlier this year.
The Original Story Factor
A Curse So Dark and Lonely mostly retells the basic Beauty and the Beast story, the one we all know of from Beaumont or Disney. There is a beast, he’s been cursed by a witch, and a girl must save him. There are no roses here, but there is an enchanted castle with magical objects that move or play on their own, which we see in the original tales.
The book branches off from the original tales in several ways, however. Rather than becoming a trade for her father, Harper’s father is dead, and she is instead kidnapped into this magical world by a friend of the beast character. Not only that, but the only beastly thing about Rhen for the majority of the book is his personality. He’s brusque, arrogant, and a little impulsive, but human (until the end of the season, when he then does become a savage beast, a curse he hopes to break). Thankfully Harper’s no-nonsense personality is a great counterpoint to this.
Harper herself diverges from the original tales’ basic Beauty, and not just because of her disability. She’s intelligent, brave, and deeply caring, and expresses all of these traits not only to Rhen or Grey, but to the various people she meets throughout the kingdom. She is also incredibly humble, and not in a way that is annoying or makes her seem weak.
Rhen’s world has no understanding of modern medicine, so one of Harper’s struggles is trying to explain her disability. She has cerebral palsy, which weakens the muscles in her body. She has had surgery to mitigate the effects, but she still has weakness or stiffness in her left side, and running, dancing, and fighting (all of which she does at various points in the story) can sometimes be difficult. She walks with a limp, sometimes slight and sometimes pronounced, leading people joining her and Rhen’s army to believe she is some kind of war veteran. The ways she handles these situations are evidence of her humble but witty nature. She resists the attempts for people to label her as some kind of hero for “overcoming” her disability or for gaining a disability through war efforts she never took part in. She heatedly explains, during a sword-fighting lesson, that she was born with her disability, and will die with her disability, and she doesn’t want pity, she wants to learn ways to work with what she has in order to fight.
This is one way disabled people navigate society, and an example of how society should interact with people with disabilities. Not with pity, but by listening to what they need, and adjusting the surroundings or situations to accommodate them. Because no one should be excluded.
The book brings also in the sorceress more overtly, and let me tell you, she’s a nasty piece of work. Be prepared to dislike her deeply. However, it is through her manipulations that the curse cure–normally brought about by Beauty confessing love or promising to marry the Beast–becomes uniquely changed and different. In fact, how much “true love” is involved in Rhen’s curse being broken is left up to the reader to decide.
The Criticism
While the book isn’t perfect, it is really well-written and the plot, characters, and world-building all carefully thought out. In fact, the majority of my criticism is nit-picky stuff.
Like the map on the first few pages. No offense to the map designer, or Brigid Kemmerer, (or both if Kemmerer drew the map) but the map looks…half-finished. Like a rough draft almost. I actually had a good chuckle looking over it. It’s mostly the sea part that bothers me. I’m sorry, but coasts aren’t that smooth and…well the bay looks like an oven mitt. It just does! It isn’t an important detail, but I’m always of the opinion that if you plan to incorporate a map in a fantasy work (and you should! they’re cool!) you should make it look as professional as possible. And incorporate irregular coastlines that look like coastlines.
Like I said. Nit-picky.
The other nit-picky thing was that the chapters alternated between Rhen and Harper’s points of view, although sometimes there were repeat chapters from one or the other. This in and of itself wasn’t a problem, but it did sometimes result in a couple “wait whose head am I in right now?” moments. The book is written from a first person perspective, which might have caused some of the confusion. Despite that each chapter was carefully labeled either “Harper” or “Rhen,” there were still those moments where the narrative voices of Rhen and Harper sounded too similar and there was a brief disconnect as I tried to think back to whose perspective I was reading from.
My last nit-picky moment actually comes from the sword fighting lesson where Harper explains that she was born with her disability and will die with it and requests ways to work with what she has. This is told from Rhen’s perspective, and we don’t actually get the exact words Harper says to her instructors. Just a glossing over of the situation.
I would have so liked to see that moment from Harper’s point of view, with her exact words. It’s important to give minorities a voice, and that would have been an excellent moment to really explore in Kemmerer’s work.
Final Thoughts
Overall, though, I still think A Curse So Dark and Lonely is a refreshing new take on a timeless Beauty and the Beast tale, and the added positive representation of disability is a definite bonus. What I like best is that Harper doesn’t end the book with a magical cure for her cerebral palsy. In fact, she’s a little more banged up than before. Instead, the only one “cured” is Rhen, and even that is handled with mystery and ambiguity, enough to leave a reader wondering if there’s more to the story.
Spoiler alert–there is.
The story of Harper and Rhen’s adventure as a Beauty and the Beast retelling may have ended with A Curse So Dark and Lonely, but their adventures aren’t altogether over. I’m excited to see what comes next in the sequel, A Heart So Fierce and Broken, especially as it is from the perspective of one of my favorite characters from the book, Commander Grey. Maybe it will become a future review? You’ll just have to wait and see!