Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Actual Rating: 3.5*

Dani and I are reviewing this on for our BAMF Review book for December!

I had a love-hate relationship with BEAST because I loved the story but I didn't like the MC and that made it really hard to connect to anyone BUT Jamie. I feel like had the story been from Jamie's POV, I would have enjoyed it more. She was perfectly flawed and written so well in my opinion and I loved every second of it. Jamie is transgender, so I read some reviews from people who identify as transgender to better understand how they felt about her characterization before writing my review. There were some that thought she was well written and others that had issues with some of the characterizations, so please take my review with a grain of salt as I can only talk about this to the extent of my knowledge and realize that my voice should not be the one listened to the most over others who have lived experiences.

I liked the retelling aspect of it and thought that Spangler did a good job working in elements of the original story and twisting it to fit into contemporary times. I enjoyed that Dylan's personality and aspects of his life made him more of a "Beast" rather than a curse on him or anything like that. I also really liked the therapy scene where the majority of the characters talked about their body issues -- both the teen girls in the session and Dylan who felt uncomfortable in his body. I felt like I could really relate to everyone there because it took me years to feel comfortable in my own skin and even to this day I still have body image issues. Of course, not to the same extent as what others may feel.

I did like that it didn't really feel like a "reveal" that Jamie was transgender because there were clues along the way that if you know what to look for, you would have understood and picked up on them along the way. I thought that the majority of the aspects of Jamie being transgender were handled well and I felt as though I learned something from reading this book. I do agree with Wesaun's review that there was too much focus on genitalia and that is a huge thing for cis people to get caught up on and highlighting that over everything else reinforces this type of thinking rather than breaking free of it in the narrative. I would recommend reading both Wesaun's and Meredith Russo's review as they have differing opinions on the transgender representation in the novel and their opinion matters more than mine.

However, I did not like Dylan's POV at all. He didn't need to be super likeable for me to understand his perspective, but I felt like he kept making the wrong choice -- and the stupid choice -- over and over again. You never really saw any character development until the VERY end of the novel and it was too late for me by that point. I did love the narration (I listened to this as an audiobook) but I did not love Dylan. And that really hindered my enjoyment of the novel.

As a caution, there are a lot of transphobic thoughts in Dylan's mind during this novel, so please be advised of that if you are sensitive to that sort of thing. I would recommend this to people who are beginning their journey to learning more about transgender but please recognize that this may not be the best representation that you can find.