![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
The Beautiful And The Cursed by Page Morgan
The Blurb On The Back:
Ingrid Waverly is a girl to be reckoned with.
Faced with their beloved brother’s mysterious disappearance, Ingrid and her sister Gabriella move to Paris, determined to find him. But instead the sisters are drawn into a terrifying underworld – watched over by Luc and Nolan, two impossible handsome protectors with dark secrets of their own …
Amongst the Gothic streets and alleys of nineteenth-century Paris, otherworldly secrets, deadly attractions and hidden powers stalk Ingrid and Gabriella, and love is found in the most unexpected ways.
A thrilling and forbidden romance.
It’s December 1899 and 17-year-old Lady Ingrid Waverly and her 15 year old sister Gabriella have moved from London to Paris with their mother who wishes to convert an old abbey into an art gallery. Ingrid’s happy to be away from London, having disgraced herself over a young man but on arriving in Paris the family discovers that Ingrid’s twin brother, Grayson, has disappeared and the authorities show no interest in finding him thanks to his disreputable lifestyle.
Determined to find Grayson themselves, Ingrid and Gabriella enlist the help of Vander Burke, a young American bookshop owner who befriended Grayson and Nolan Quinn, a Scottish private investigator. Their search takes them to a dark underworld populated by demons, hellhounds and gargoyles like Luc, the mysterious and arrogant teenage servant who lives at the abbey. There they find a sinister conspiracy that threatens the world, a conspiracy that needs Ingrid if it is to succeed …
Page Morgan’s debut YA historical fantasy is an okay read but I found the plot to be needlessly overcomplicated at times and reliant on contrivance to keep moving. I enjoyed Morgan’s take on gargoyles but there are a lot of groups and factions to keep in mind as the story progresses and neither Ingrid nor Gabriella really appealed to me as main characters and the inevitable YA love triangle between Ingrid, Luc and Vander never held my interest. I also found the villain to be one dimensional and the period feel never really convinced me with characters using modern colloquialisms at times, throwing me out of the story.
The central characters of Luc and Ingrid are well developed on the page but the angst that Morgan fills them both with irritated me instead of making me empathise with them. Ingrid in particular lacks gumption and I was utterly unconvinced by the reveal of her scandalous past. The mythology surrounding the gargoyles however is fascinating and I enjoyed the interaction between Luc and the other gargoyles and his personal attitude to his human charges.
The large number of groups and factions made me struggle at times and resulted in the pace sometimes sagging, while the split between narrators meant that I never really connected with any of them.
Ultimately, this is an okay book likely to appeal to fans of Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices Trilogy but I’m not in a hurry to read the sequel.
The Verdict:
Page Morgan’s debut YA historical fantasy is an okay read but I found the plot to be needlessly overcomplicated at times and reliant on contrivance to keep moving. I enjoyed Morgan’s take on gargoyles but there are a lot of groups and factions to keep in mind as the story progresses and neither Ingrid nor Gabriella really appealed to me as main characters and the inevitable YA love triangle between Ingrid, Luc and Vander never held my interest. I also found the villain to be one dimensional and the period feel never really convinced me with characters using modern colloquialisms at times, throwing me out of the story.
Faced with their beloved brother’s mysterious disappearance, Ingrid and her sister Gabriella move to Paris, determined to find him. But instead the sisters are drawn into a terrifying underworld – watched over by Luc and Nolan, two impossible handsome protectors with dark secrets of their own …
Amongst the Gothic streets and alleys of nineteenth-century Paris, otherworldly secrets, deadly attractions and hidden powers stalk Ingrid and Gabriella, and love is found in the most unexpected ways.
A thrilling and forbidden romance.
It’s December 1899 and 17-year-old Lady Ingrid Waverly and her 15 year old sister Gabriella have moved from London to Paris with their mother who wishes to convert an old abbey into an art gallery. Ingrid’s happy to be away from London, having disgraced herself over a young man but on arriving in Paris the family discovers that Ingrid’s twin brother, Grayson, has disappeared and the authorities show no interest in finding him thanks to his disreputable lifestyle.
Determined to find Grayson themselves, Ingrid and Gabriella enlist the help of Vander Burke, a young American bookshop owner who befriended Grayson and Nolan Quinn, a Scottish private investigator. Their search takes them to a dark underworld populated by demons, hellhounds and gargoyles like Luc, the mysterious and arrogant teenage servant who lives at the abbey. There they find a sinister conspiracy that threatens the world, a conspiracy that needs Ingrid if it is to succeed …
Page Morgan’s debut YA historical fantasy is an okay read but I found the plot to be needlessly overcomplicated at times and reliant on contrivance to keep moving. I enjoyed Morgan’s take on gargoyles but there are a lot of groups and factions to keep in mind as the story progresses and neither Ingrid nor Gabriella really appealed to me as main characters and the inevitable YA love triangle between Ingrid, Luc and Vander never held my interest. I also found the villain to be one dimensional and the period feel never really convinced me with characters using modern colloquialisms at times, throwing me out of the story.
The central characters of Luc and Ingrid are well developed on the page but the angst that Morgan fills them both with irritated me instead of making me empathise with them. Ingrid in particular lacks gumption and I was utterly unconvinced by the reveal of her scandalous past. The mythology surrounding the gargoyles however is fascinating and I enjoyed the interaction between Luc and the other gargoyles and his personal attitude to his human charges.
The large number of groups and factions made me struggle at times and resulted in the pace sometimes sagging, while the split between narrators meant that I never really connected with any of them.
Ultimately, this is an okay book likely to appeal to fans of Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices Trilogy but I’m not in a hurry to read the sequel.
The Verdict:
Page Morgan’s debut YA historical fantasy is an okay read but I found the plot to be needlessly overcomplicated at times and reliant on contrivance to keep moving. I enjoyed Morgan’s take on gargoyles but there are a lot of groups and factions to keep in mind as the story progresses and neither Ingrid nor Gabriella really appealed to me as main characters and the inevitable YA love triangle between Ingrid, Luc and Vander never held my interest. I also found the villain to be one dimensional and the period feel never really convinced me with characters using modern colloquialisms at times, throwing me out of the story.