Beastkeeper

Semester 2, blog post 5

This blog post may contain spoilers. Reader discretion is advised. You have been warned...mwahahaha. >:D

Recently, I completed the short novel (197 pages) titled Beastkeeper by Cat Hellisen. In this story, Hellisen takes the reader to a forest hidden in a world much like our own, in which kings, queens, witches, wizards and strange animals reside. Like a world you would find in a fairy tale, perhaps. But a fair word of warning.

This is NOT your typical fairy tale.

But I'll explain why later. There's more to be said about the novel first.

Starting off, I'll admit that this book is mainly written for middle grade readers, but in my defense, Cat Hellisen's writing was too alluring for me to be able to put it down. I blame her gorgeous storytelling skills for this. An example?

"Sarah tiptoed along the landing toward her parents' room and wondered what flavor silence was, and if it grew hard and brittle if you threw it away, or if people sometimes stepped on wads of discarded silence and it stuck to the soles of their shoes and made their footfalls softer," (4).

So yeah. Hellisen's pretty talented with words, isn't she?

Anyway, a quick synopsis of the novel: It's a very loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, except for a few things. The girl is the beast. And love doesn't break the curse; it stimulates it.

The main character of the novel is a girl named Sarah. She discovers that the curse runs in her family. And it all started with her grandparents.

Sarah's grandparents were once prince and princess, but they did not truly love each other. They were vain, and beautiful, and only liked each other because they saw themselves reflected in the eyes of the other, so to speak. So, the sister of the princess, who was a powerful witch, became angry that the two "lovers" were so caught up in each other's beauty that they could not tell who truly loved them. Which is why she cursed them. And when the prince and princess, turned king and queen, had child, they passed the curse down to their son.

But what exactly was the curse? The descendant of the king and queen, upon truly falling in love with their partner, would become a beast. However, they could become human again, if their partner falls in love with them as well. But if that doesn't happen, well, the beast stays a beast for the rest of their life. And the one they fell in love with would be doomed to stay with the beast forever, because if they left, they would turn into a small wren, and undoubtedly die within a short period of time. It's quite a creative curse, if you think about it.

And the curse will never be broken until the witch who first cast it chooses to pass down her forest-guarding powers to her successor, which would result in her death. Otherwise, she's kind of immortal, so waiting for her to die naturally isn't really an option.

I'm not going to reveal any more than that, because what I was going to talk about was the theme. The theme of this particular novel isn't one you'd expect, since "love" is just about the most frequently (mis)used word of this century.

Love is fickle.

Yup, that's right. You can just as easily fall OUT of love as you fall IN. And sometimes, you just can't bring yourself to love another person, no matter how much you have at stake.

Thus the theme, among other elements (that cannot be given away at this moment), makes this novel different from your typical fairy tale. If you're curious to know how it ends, then you're going to have to read it. ;)

Oh, and by the way, in case you're interested, you can find Cat Hellisen's website here. You can also find a Wikipedia article about Hellisen here.

You have now reached the end of my ramblings. I hope I didn't bore you to death. And now I should probably thank you appropriately for reading. So thanks, I guess.