It's Beauty and the Beast! I can't help but read B&tB retellings even though they always disappoint me (Disney and [a:Robin McKinley|5339|Robin McKinley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1314406026p2/5339.jpg] make all the other versions look bad). However, remembering not to get excited helped a lot.

This one was good. For one thing, it had a reason for existing and it actually had something new to do with the story rather than "just" retelling it. It was also clever: Hodge comes up with a very good backstory for all her characters and, while the world-building sometimes feels more like window-dressing, it's very good window-dressing and I rarely notice that the world doesn't quite seem...flesh-outable.

And Nyx (beauty) has a personality! And she's not a goody two shoes. Her inner demons were my favorite part of her, although (first novel problems) Hodge had a tendency to have Nyx tell us what she was feeling rather than letting Nyx feel it on the page.

Anyway, definitely worth reading in my never-ending quest to read all the reasonably enjoyable YA fairy tale retellings (except the urban fantasy ones because I'm pickier about UF).
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Thoughts on the reread - holy toxic family dynamics batman!
I feel like there's a whole thing to be written about Hodge and trauma/culpability/forgiveness (and I'm also getting bitten by the unexamined Christian attitudes towards forgiveness and guilt that her stories seem to have).
Also, pacing is very different in audiobook form than print. Funny how much more sense the ending made.