Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: Beastly Manor
AUTHOR: Alex Hall
PUBLISHER: Madison Place Press
LENGTH: 293 Pages
RELEASE DATE: January 20, 2016
BLURB:
Once upon a time in a faraway land a very wealthy merchant lived on a good piece of land just west of the hamlet we now call Littleton. The merchant was blessed with luck and guile, strong bones and sharp eyes, a pretty wife of gentle spirit, and four healthy children whom he called Faith, Hope, Beauty, and Corbin.
An LGBT twist on the classic love story.
REVIEW:
I was probably the perfect person to take this book for a review. I’ll admit it, I’ve never paid much attention to the Beauty and the Beast story. I’ve never even contemplated watching that Disney movie. It always just sounded a bit dumb to me. So a book named Beastly Manor that plays on that old story except it has a male lead? Why not.
I enjoyed the world building that the author brought us, as well as the characters. Let me say for the record, that this isn’t a book which contains a lot of LGBT elements, really not much more than a few references, but it held my attention with the story line and the events.
Corbin de Beaumont is the oldest child of a cheese merchant in the small town of Littleton, which borders the forest inhabited by a Beast. Very early in the book we learn that Corbin’s mother was killed by the Beast and Corbin’s father lived and swore revenge. But to escape the Beast, the father has pledged his eldest child to the Beast on that child’s eighteenth birthday.
Well….in this version of the tale, Beauty isn’t the oldest, Corbin is. I enjoyed the different parts of this book. It wasn’t in any way a romance novel. It was more of a fantasy / revised historical fiction type book. We followed Corbin as he grew older, as he went away to learn sword skills to kill the Beast, and as he finally met the Beast. I’ll be honest and tell you without spoilers that I really was looking for more in the third part of the book. It never really went where I hoped it would go. OK, maybe it was alluded to, but it didn’t really go there, which was a disappointment.
The story was interesting, but there were also some issues with this book. It really needed a good editor’s touch. There were a lot of misused words (i.e. tale versus tail) and there were a lot of missing words and repeated words. Because of the latter two, there were also a lot of semi-unreadable sentences. Did it detract from my enjoyment of the book? No. I liked the story, and was able to intuitively read what should have been there in spots. I see too many books like this one that are well written, but never passed through one or more beta readers who would, or at least should, have found those simple errors prior to publishing.
With the editing issues, I’m going to say this one fits into our “Good/Average” rating. I can’t tell you how it will compare to the Beauty and the Beast tales, because like I said above, I haven’t ever been interested in those.
RATING: 
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