Young adult fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast with a werewolf twist? Yes, please! That’s really all I needed to check out Cry Wolf by Jacque Stevens. It also doesn’t hurt that I write fairy tale retellings because I love them so much, and Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorites.
Cry Wolf (2020)
Written By: Jacque Stevens
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy
Pages: 164 pages (Kindle)
Series: Hightower Beauty and the Beast Book 1
Publisher: sjacquebooks
The Premise:
I looked between the monster and the man, and I knew at once who was the beast.
Isabelle Berger grew up hearing stories of a legendary beast who killed over a hundred people. When a new wolf is spotted near the forest, the men of her village are convinced that another monster is on the rise. Isabelle is less certain, until her father is killed in the hunt.
Alone and hungry for revenge, Isabelle strikes out on her own to face the dreaded beast. But in this darker twist of a timeless fairytale, things might not be what they seem.
If you like inspirational heroines, unique love stories, and some darker thrills and chills this paranormal/shifter romance is for you!
Spoiler free!
Discussion: I’ve read a lot of Beauty and the Beast stories over the years. Like I said, it’s one of my favorite fairy tales. I’ve also read a lot of stories about werewolves. And this one was pretty good on both those fronts. It wasn’t especially long or epic, but it was just the thing I needed right now. Short and sweet with the promise of more to come.
It’s really easy with fairy tale retellings to fall into the trap of repeating tired old tropes and rehashing a stale story over and over. Even adding werewolves to a familiar tale in order to hit two subgenres has the potential for problems. But Stevens managed to bring a really unique touch to this story that I wasn’t expecting, which launched it out of the murky depths of overdone tropes.
I loved the historical context given by the French revolution and the insights Stevens brought into the story with this. Isabelle’s friend, Jean, returns from the war with stories about beheadings in the capital and capturing escaped nobles, but Isabelle can’t help noticing something’s a little off about it all. It was a wonderful undercurrent to the changes in their friendship and the complete disregard he had for her words and feelings. Stevens wove this through the story in a way that felt completely natural and in the background until the moment you realized that this bloody history managed to inform the entire story.
And she did the same thing with the very real story about the Beast of Gévaudan. I’m not familiar with that little bit of French history, but now I want to go do some of my own research and find all the little Easter eggs and parallels Stevens sprinkled into Cry Wolf.
There were some bits of world-building, especially around the magic system and the shifter aspect, that could have used some fleshing out. The whole talking mother wolf threw me for a loop, and the werewolf origins seemed a little glossed-over. But with three more books in the series, maybe that will be something to look forward to later.
In Conclusion: This ended up being a sweet little romance with a wonderfully conflicted heroine and a hero that rode the edge between awkwardly cute and dangerously powerful. And while I totally thought I had the twist figured out halfway through the book, I was completely wrong. Cry Wolf managed to surprise me and lure me in with its clever use of historical parallels. I’ll definitely be checking out the sequels.
I’m also a big fan of new takes on the Beauty and the Beast story. I’m glad that I read this review because I would have been put off by the cheesy cover.