Beauty A Retelling of the Story of Beauty & the Beast

     When Sunday meets an enchanted frog who asks about her stories, the two become friends. Soon that friendship deepens into something magical. One night Sunday kisses her frog goodbye and leaves, not realizing that her love has transformed him back into Rumbold, the crown prince of Arilland—and a man Sundays family despises.

     The prince returns to his castle, intent on making Sunday fall in love with him as the man he is, not the frog he was. But Sunday is not so easy to woo. How can she feel such a strange, strong attraction for this prince she barely knows? And what twisted secrets lie hidden in his past—and hers?

A Kirkus Best Teen Book of 2012A World Book Night SelectionAn ALA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults SelectionAn Andre Norton Award Nominee

* "A fabulous fairy-tale mashup that deserves hordes of avid readers. Absolutely delectable."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

* "Kontis delivers a fairy-tale mash-up that outright sparkles."—School Library Journal, starred review

"Fantasy readers will undoubtedly enjoy the . . . mash-up of these famous stories, spiced with comedy, romance and magical powers."—VOYA

"A wonderful mix-up of fairy-tale tropes, a clever love story, and a delightful tale all on its own!"—Tamora Pierce

"A charming tumble of fairy tales, spiced with humor and sprinkled with true love." —Sharon Shinn, best-selling author of the Samaria series

"If Neil Gaiman and the Brothers Grimm had a child who grew up to weave fairy tales, she would be Alethea Kontis. Read this book—it’s an absolute winner."—J.T. Ellison, best-selling author of Where All the Dead Lie

"As mischievous as a garden full of fairies and twice as clever, Enchanted proves there’s more than life left in the oldest genre in the world—there’s a lot of heart, too." —Sean Williams, New York Times best-selling author

"Kontis is a born spell-caster and her work is spellbinding. In the style of great fairy tales, Kontis has created a delightful, heartfelt new classic that can charm the sun out from behind the clouds." —Leanna Renee Hieber, author of the Strangely Beautiful and Magic Most Foul series

"Alethea Kontis’s debut is full of inventive whimsy. Take your favorite fairytale and spin it to the side, throw in a half-dozen other tales all dancing, and you get this Enchanted ball."—Mary Robinette Kowal, award-winning author of Shades of Milk and Honey

"It's the relaxed humor of Kontis' presentation that not only ups the realism of characters unfazed by talking frogs and fey characters but also gives this offering its sweet, distinctive stamp."—Booklist

Beauty has never liked her nickname. She is thin and awkward; it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage.

When her father comes home with the tale of an enchanted castle in the forest and the terrible promise he had to make to the Beast who lives there, Beauty knows she must go to the castle, a prisoner of her own free will. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?"

Robin McKinley's beloved telling illuminates the unusual love story of a most unlikely couple: Beauty and the Beast.

In Her Own Words...

"I was an only child and my father was in the Navy. We moved every year or two—California, Japan, upstate New York, New England. I early found the world of books much more satisfactory than the unstable so-called real world. I can’t remember the first time I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s but this particular story, about a little girl all alone in a strange land who told stories so wonderful that she believed them herself, fasci-nated me. I never quite lived up to Sara Crewe’s standard, but I tried awfully hard.

"Writing has always been the other side of reading for me; it never occurred to me not to make up stories. Once I got old enough to realize that authorship existed as a thing one might aspire to, I knew it was for me. I even majored in English literature in college, a good indication of my fine bold disdain for anything so trivial as earning a living; I was going to be a writer, like Dickens and Hardy and George Eliot. And Kipling and H. Rider Haggard and J.R.R. Tolkien. I was, however, going to tell breathtaking stories about girls who had adventures. I was tired of the boys always getting the best parts in the best books. What with reading and making up my own stories, I spent most of my life in my head; about the only irresistible attraction reality had for me was in the shape of horses and riding. And I liked traveling. Perhaps because of my childhood, staying in one place for very long just seemed to me like a waste of opportunity.

"It’s funny, though, the things life does to you. Inadvertently I discovered myself settling down, looking for excuses not to climb on another airplane. I bought a house because I fell in love with it, and it was somewhere to leave the thousands of books I picked up everywhere I went. Later, I decided that I wanted something around that didn’t necessarily sit politely on a shelf till I took it down, so I bought a dog, a whippet I named Rowan. Insidiously I began liking it that tomorrow was going to be much like yesterday: walking the dog, sitting at the typewriter. I declared myself to have found home in my tiny house in a small village two-thirds of the way up the coast of Maine. I also, a little ruefully, concluded that my individual mix of the writer’s traditional absent-mindedness, a rather uncompromising feminism, and a naturally intransigent personality made marriage or any sort of permanent romantic attachment impractical. I didn’t actually think I was missing much; I liked being single.

"This no doubt explains—somehow—why I am now living in a small village in a very large house in Hampshire, England, with my husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson, three whippets, and a horse, and what seems to me, the only child and ex-solitary adult, about half a million Dickinson grandchildren rioting underfoot, down the corridors, and across the garden. When Peter and I decided to get married, it was obvious to me I was the one who had to emigrate; I was the military brat with lifelong experience of pulling up and moving on. So I dug up my tender new under-standing of “home,” packed it very carefully, and broughtit over here with me, with the eighty cartons of books and one bewildered whippet. It has taken root vigorously here, but the message to headquarters is very emphatic: “Don’t you ever do this to us again.” I’m not likely to: I’ve planted over four hundred rosebushes in what were once Peter’s classic English garden borders—and look after them devotedly. I have the scars to prove it. I think I’ve discovered reality after all. I’m astonished at how interesting it is. It’s giving me more things to write stories about."