View review on my blog here.

My First Impression

After finishing Fairest of All, I could not wait to jump into the next book in the Disney Villains series! Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite Disney stories, so I was even more excited to read about the Beast's backstory.

With Beauty and the Beast being an all-time favorite of mine, the excitement about this book quickly became a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I was very excited to read about the Beast's backstory and understand his side of things. But on the other hand, what if the book didn't live up to my expectations? What if I became disappointed with the entire story of Beauty and the Beast after reading this book?

Well, I am happy to report that I was far from disappointed!

Getting Reading

The story with this one went back and forth a bit. In Fairest of All, the story is very linear from before the Queen meets the King and continues up to the classic Snow White story and then onward. However, this book starts during the classic Beauty and the Beast tale and then a lot of the book is the Beast remembering the events in his life that brought him to where he is now. Honestly, I really enjoyed that because it made it feel like the books weren't all going to have the same storytelling formula. While the formula for the first book was good, I could also see it getting stale after a while. So I was happy to see a bit of a change here.

Without getting into any spoilers, there were actually a couple of twists in this book that I did not see coming. These added a whole new perspective on the Beast and other characters in the book. Also, as I suspected (and honestly, as it was pointed out online before I read the books...), there were a couple of little tie-ins to the first book. None seemed to have a huge impact on the story, but there was a familiar group of characters that stuck around.

Final Thoughts

With the twists that came up, as well as the tie-ins from the first book, this book really just took my love of Disney to a whole new level! Especially for the story of Beauty and the Beast.

The Beast Within - Likewise Book Reviews

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