Beauty and the Werewolf [Hardcover]

Beauty and the Werewolf is the sixth and latest installment in the Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms presented by the talented Mercedes Lackey. Like last year's Sleeping Beauty, Lackey is building fairy tales on the well known and well-traveled landscapes we all know, and then throwing a hard left-right that leaves all of the figures scrambled and everyone saying someone else's lines.

Surprisingly, this year's Beauty is not nearly the departure from traditional storytelling that last year's was. In this story, our "beauty" is named, predictably, "Bella" and is the oldest of a blended family of three girls. As is proper and traditional, Bella is the self-created head of the household. Her useless but assuredly not wicked stepmother spends her time in the bliss of mild hypochondria, cared for by well-meaning and understanding old gents who do their best to keep her happy with her gossip and warm wraps. Bella's sweet and empty-headed twin step-sisters are merely the first gatekeepers to the plot; they are used and promptly discarded literally 20 pages into the story.

Bella throws on her crimson winter wrap, and tromps off into the forest Red-Hood-style to visit the old wise woman in the woods. While on her way to Granny's house, Bella runs into the very disagreeable woodsman Eric, who warns her away from the woods. Bella rebuffs and rebukes him quite strongly, has a lovely visit with Granny, and is promptly bitten by a werewolf - the reclusive Duke Sebastian - on her way home. And with that werewolf attack, Lackey snatches the plot off of the Red Riding Hood path and drops it firmly onto the Beauty and the Beast plot line, delivering Bella to Duke Sebastian's castle to live out a three-month quarantine on her werewolf bite.

In this series, which began with The Fairy Godmother, Lackey takes the fairy tales we remember (Rapunzel, etc.), reminds us of the trope and expectations within each, and then promptly twists them around into new stories and new endings. The mindless magical force that drives many of the life stories within the Five Hundred Kingdoms is The Tradition. The Tradition gets its magic from the repetition of stories around the fireplaces - the faith of the common people - but is agnostic about any particular endings, good or bad. The Fairy Godmothers, Sorcerers, and other Tradition-educated magic users are constantly in a battle of wits and wills to manipulate The Tradition's force into happy endings (which might not be the actual traditional ending). The readers learn about the forces involved as the characters - Bella and Sebastian - find themselves feeling oddly emotional in times and places when it does not make logical sense.

The strengths of this book, and the series, are the characters themselves. Bella is amazingly self-aware and logical about her situation, and horribly stubborn in going about her rebellion. While she rebels against being manipulated by the characters in the castle where she is moved to live out her possible werewolf quarantine, she also explores the reasons for the werewolf's existence and the woodsman's horrid attitude. She also pursues wide-ranging studies, and finally figures out what The Tradition can do for her when she decides what she wants for a solution.

This is, I think, one of the better installments of the 500 Kingdoms series. Mercedes Lackey has clearly taken to heart some of the lessons from The Sleeping Princess: the overall tone of the book is much more tongue-in-cheek and playful, without the attempt to make everything deep and dramatic, and also relatively free of (as another reviewer phrased it) the preachiness that has marked some of the other books in this series. In addition, the romantic relationship between the protagonists is handled very well, without the feeling of "I need a romance, let me throw it in out of nowhere" that some of the earlier books suffered.

Bella is a mostly likeable protagonist, although she still has some of those requisite "more practical than thou" moments. (They're a staple of this series in particular, and they get a little tiresome after the third or fourth book.) One point that I did find somewhat disappointing was the way her character development was handled: unlike the standard heroines of the 500 Kingdoms, Bella starts out with an unexplicated but quite visible selfish streak. There was one point in the book where she thinks that the werewolf can't possibly feel as bad about her situation than she does. This is a man who has lived as a complete hermit for five years in terror of the thought that he might cause exactly this situation! Bella does grow up, by watching how her family pulls together to deal with her absence. I just kept waiting for a moment where she would acknowledge that perhaps she did not give Sebastian sufficient credit when she first met him.

Sebastian is a completely endearing character as well. Like Seigfried in The Sleeping Princess, he takes one of the classic MALE stereotypes of folklore - in his case, the absentminded, unworldly scholar - and both plays to his stereotype and goes beyond it. He is unworldly, but he is also a powerful and skilled sorcerer who clearly takes his responsibilities seriously. (Which is part of why Bella's failure to acknowledge that side of his character grated somewhat.)

Oddly enough, however, my favorite part of this story was probably the villain. Villains are often a major weakness in Lackey's books - either they come from nowhere in the very end of the book (as was the case in The Fairy Godmother), or they are so blatantly, utterly evil that they're hard to believe. That was not the case in this book. On the one hand, it was more or less obvious who the culprit was by the end of the fourth chapter, which was one of the major weaknesses of the book - with only three central characters, there wasn't even a red herring to divert suspicion temporarily. On the other hand, the villain actually showed that in addition to his nastiness, he was also a responsible person in his own way, aware of his own failings, and even well-intentioned in a short-sighted way. (I also can't help but think that Godmothers and their ilk are so used to thinking of things in terms of The Tradition that they forget basic psychology and profiling in looking for culprits!)

Final analysis: fans of Mercedes Lackey will definitely enjoy this story; it's a fast, entertaining read, endearing, and it patches some of the more common plotholes in Lackey's writing. Those new to her writing should probably read The Fairy Godmother and perhaps The Sleeping Princess first - but this would be a good third choice.

I very much enjoy Lackey's 500 Kingdoms, but this was a severe disappointment. If you have read Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose (The Elemental Masters Fairy Tales), then you will know exactly what to expect from Beauty and the Werewolf. I mistakenly read Changes: Volume Three of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel) around the same time as this book, and I now wonder if Mercedes Lackey is even trying. Both efforts have been lackluster and without her usual flair for creativity and the creation of characters we all care about. It may be her publisher. It may be her own laziness, but I hope it is her publisher. Mercedes Lackey, please go back to writing books we can appreciate!

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