This book was very different than what I was expecting - not in a bad way, just a different way. For the most part, I enjoyed the story. It was fun, funny at times, and interesting, but something about the story seemed to jump around. I don't know if that's the right way to describe it, but when I think back to the storyline it seems disjointed. That's where it lost points for me. Characters were interesting, but sometimes their storylines were a part of the disjointed feeling. Maybe it was the writing style and I'm just not used to it. *Shrug*

I enjoyed Kira's character - pretty straight forward and you can empathize with her.
Robert - sweet character, but I wish we would have gotten to know him better.
Bertie - will be interesting to see where his story goes
Diana - seemed like a strong character and it will be interesting to see where her story goes
Xavier - petulant brat. Not really a fan
Caris - interesting character. I want her and her partner's story

In this twisted fairytale with ties to Beauty and the Beast, Princess Kira, of the Known Kingdoms has a secret, she has been using a magical cloak to transform into the infamous Beast of Barlow and terrorizing travelers. But when her cousin and dearest friend Bertie asks for her help in finding out what has caused a group of orphans to transform into beasts when they go outside, she is going to need help. Enter Sir Robert, aka Shiny Hair, the son of a duke and Kira’s secret crush (not that she would EVER admit that). She plans to let him help her but will keep her secrets and certainly will not fall for him.

I just could not get into this book, the blurb sounds amazing, and the idea of the book is fantastic, but I just didn’t enjoy the execution of the novel. Kira is hard to like, she is selfish, self-centered, bitter and rude. In addition to my dislike of the heroine, this book read like a YA novel and not a New Adult Romantasy. Also, this novel is in desperate need of editing/proofreading, there are a significant number of typos and numerous title errors (Note, this was a review copy and may (hopefully) be corrected prior to publication). In the end, I just didn’t care for this book, but I am sure there are plenty of readers, especially those who prefer YA novels, who would enjoy it.

*I am voluntarily leaving a review for an eARC that I requested and was provided to me by the publisher/author. All opinions in this review are my own. *

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ You Should Read “Curtsies & Consequences” by Melissa Constantine

If you like…
* Slow Burn
* Relatable Characters
* Magic & Fairies
* Laughing Out Loud
* Beauty & the Beast

HER:🩷
An angry princess pretending to be a beast

HIM:💙
A beautiful knight who is honor-bound to protect her

THEIR STORY:📖
Kira, Princess Royal of the Known Kingdoms, has a big, particularly hairy secret. That terrifying thing running through the woods around Corlea Palace? That’s her.

And she plans to keep it up, using the magic of an old cloak to be the mythical Beast of Barlow. It’s all going just fine until she receives an urgent request from her cousin Bertie to help him figure out why a group of orphans is turning into little copies of the Beast whenever they go outside. To help solve the mystery Kira is paired with Sir Robert, perhaps the most infuriatingly beautiful (and far too preceptive) knight on the continent, before a planned hunt for the Beast puts them in even more danger. All she has to do is keep her secrets close and Robert closer. Easy.

Until she wakes up as the Beast she’s been pretending to be.

Pre-order now (out 10/3/24):
https://amzn.to/4gsPj4t

If you like funny with your fantasy, you’re gonna love this!

Thank you to @sunvalleybooks and #NetGalley for letting me enjoy an advanced copy of Curtsies & Consequences.

❤️
♥️
♥️

#CurtsiesConsequences #newadult #romance #sciencefiction #fantasy #bookaddict #bookaddiction #bookreview #bookreviewer #newbookalert #newrelease #tbrlist #booktok #nextread #reading #readingtime #bookratings #readersgonnaread #readersofinstagram #readmorebooks #read #fantasybooks #romancebooks #scifibooks #fairies #magic #beautyandthebeast #slowburn #laughoutloud

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Curtsies & consequences starts slow, but things quickly improve as you understand the main character more. I grew to like her a lot more than I expected to. My heart will always come around for an off-putting woman.
(Xavier though… kind of sucked. Even for a minor character. I’m not really one to mind when characters behave badly, but I felt like I was gonna go crazy seeing him described as an angel when all he really did was be rude and insensitive to his boyfriend. I would’ve taken all of their scenes and just gave them to Robert.)

<3 Robert!!! <3 Loved that sweet guy.

I’d best describe the world building as ‘Howl’s moving castle with Fairies.’ I really enjoyed these aspects and I’d like to read the sequel. Diana and Jordaan seem like a fun time.
This book was at its best when focused on the two main character’s and drawing on the fairytale similarities with the author’s unique twists. If ‘beauty & the beast, but the beast is a weird grumpy princess’ sounds appealing to you, check it out! 3.75 stars.

Thank you NetGalley and Sun Valley Books for the ARC.

This book is a mismatch of random fairy tale troupes and it is amazing: some Cinderella stepmother action, Beauty & the Beast (but the beauty is the beast) and some Sleeping Beauty action thrown in for good measure. I am so glad the about the author mentions that she is working on more books in this series because I would be devastated is there wasn’t more to read in this world she created.

“When she was queen, all dresses would have pockets”.

Princess Kira is my kind of future queen with rules such as all dresses having pockets and daily chocolate. As the book goes on you learn more of her past and how it has created who she is and why she acts the way she does the more you feel for her as a person. The handsome knight is the perfect love interest because they compliment each other so well.

It is a new adult romantasy and is exactly what you expect from that genre. It is written older than a YA but still has a bit of that growing up of the main character as part of the plot. I would say if you are a parent this would be safe for your older teen to read.

I generally avoid books that offer me a princess character, and at least when this book starts, Kira, the female lead, is an example of why I do that. She's petulant, rude, immature, entitled, and convinced that, despite all of this, she should have been allowed to accede to the throne in advance of her 21st birthday, rather than being placed under the regency of her stepmother (who everyone else sees as much more competent, with good reason).

Yes, there is a regency in this book, though it's not, as the form of the title suggests, a Regency book. The setting is a mostly generic fantasy world with a late-medieval feel, although also with some random anachronistic features like chocolate bars with gold-coloured foil, an icebox, and someone referred to as being "gun-shy," though we don't see any guns. We also get the word "Muppets" dropped at one point. Unfortunately, given the prevalence of aristocratic characters, the author makes some basic blunders in terminology, referring to the queen as "Her Highness" (the correct title being "Her Majesty") and sometimes having the male lead addressing the princess as "My Lady," inaccurately calling all nobles "royals" (only the monarch and their immediate family are royal), and referring to all noble territories as "kingdoms". Only a territory ruled by a king is a kingdom; one ruled by a prince is a principality, and one ruled by a duke is a duchy, so the so-called "Known Kingdoms" are, in fact, a single kingdom. She also (like a lot of fantasy authors) doesn't seem to know that a league is, by definition, the distance one can travel in an hour, so it's not possible for someone who started out maybe half an hour before you to be several leagues away, no matter how fast he rides.

Sadly, the ignorance doesn't stop there; there are also dozens of mechanical and vocabulary errors. Far too frequently, a sentence will make no grammatical sense at all, because there are whole phrases missing or a verb in completely the wrong tense, or maybe a word that's not even the right part of speech, or the wrong preposition, or a key word that appears to be chosen almost at random and have nothing to do with the intended meaning. For example, at one point a character is told "She has assured me you are quite revenant and I am not to fear from you." Apart from the odd phrasing "not to fear from you," "revenant" is a noun, not an adjective, and refers to a kind of undead creature, which doesn't fit the context whatsoever. Sometimes I can guess which word was intended, but sometimes, as with "revenant," I have no clue. Other random words along this line include "erstwhile" (which few authors use correctly), "fissure," "fop," "fallacy," and "inert," none of which strike me as particularly obscure vocabulary.

And apart from the random vocabulary words, there are a lot of homonym or near-homonym errors, some extremely basic: advanced/advance, definitive/definite, sensibility/good sense, jam/jamb, envelope/envelop, creek/creak, steal/steel, hoard/horde, wrap/rap, sight/site, hearty/hardy, stripped/striped, tact/tack, tuffs/tufts, reigned/reined (and reigns/reins), scrapped/scraped, manor/manner, led/lead (and not the verb, either, which is easily confused; it's the metal), who's/whose, proceed/precede, Robot/Robert, repelling/repealing, check/cheek, laying/lying, legions/leagues, everyone/every one, rammed/crammed, ring/wring, ascent/assent, mele/melee, ascended/descended, outrange/outrage, and it's/its. Some are clearly just typos, but if there is a way to misspell a word, this author will unerringly find it. It makes me wonder whether she mainly reads via audiobook (and never sees words spelled) and/or uses dictation software and doesn't know enough to clean up the homonyms afterwards.

I could go on and on about the many, many issues: the misplaced apostrophes when the noun is plural or a proper name ending in S (at one point, we get "Mrs. Banes's, "Mrs. Banes'" and "Mrs. Bane's" all within a couple of pages, of which either of the first two is justifiable - but it should be consistent - and the third is completely wrong), the missing past perfect, every kind of missing or misused punctuation, including mispunctuated dialog, frequently missing or misplaced commas, nearly every error it's possible to commit with a quotation mark, missing question marks when the sentence is a question and a question mark where the sentence isn't a question, capitals for terms of address that aren't titles and for the cardinal directions, and hyphens where they shouldn't be... it's a mess. Simply throwing it into Google Docs, by the way, would go a long way in finding issues like this. I marked about 400 issues, which compares poorly with the usual couple of dozen I find in an average book.

It's not just the editing, either. Plot points are dropped without notice (there's a promise of a noble title - incorrectly described, of course, as a "royal" title - that's never followed up on). There's a Convenient Eavesdrop, my absolute least favourite plot device, though it ends up not being that significant. "Oak seeds" (which the author doesn't seem to know are called acorns) are used in a metaphor that involves them circling in the breeze like dancers; that's not something acorns do. We never get an explanation of why the spell spread to the orphans specifically, or why Xav is Robert's best friend given that they come from widely separated places. Even though the chapters are headed with the name of the point of view character, in one chapter it hops back and forth several times.

But what about the characters? There's a gay couple - same-sex relationships are not an issue in this setting, and apparently political alliance is more important than succession - who we're told are happy together, but what we're shown is that one doesn't understand the other at all, and they're frequently fighting in an immature way; one is described as "kind," though I never saw him do anything kind, and several times saw him do something unkind. But they're not the main couple in the book. The main couple is the awful Princess Kira, whose only positive quality seems to be that she's beautiful, and the unfortunate Sir Robert, to whom I was metaphorically shouting, "Do not engage! I repeat, do not engage!" every time she came near him. I was actively rooting for his childhood friend, the third leg of the rather half-hearted love triangle, even though she had no particular qualities other than not being Kira, and even though I know the childhood friend always loses. Seriously, Kira is the worst. It's true that she had a loveless upbringing, and she is fairly nice to children, but... she's every negative thing I mean when I call someone a princess, and I was deeply sorry for Sir Robert, forced by the plot to be her partner against his better judgement.

A woman whose mother has been persistently not listening to her and is trying to marry her off for political reasons to a drunkard tells her "You're the best mother in the entire world." I worry for the author, I really do.

Fortunately, and to my surprise, Kira does get a character arc, which went some way to redeeming her in my eyes. She still toxically misinterprets what Robert says and leaves him wondering what he's done wrong, so it's still an unhealthy relationship, but at least she sees some of her most egregious flaws and commits to working on them. He's still in for a world of pain, poor sap.

I picked this up (via Netgalley), despite the presence of a princess, because the blurb sounded intriguing. I kept reading past the middle largely to see if I'd correctly guessed the identity of the main antagonist (I had not; <spoiler>my guess of the stepmother was, in fact, practically the only person who wasn't guilty, so kudos to the author for avoiding that worn-out trope</spoiler>). It wasn't without its positives, notably the character arc of the initially awful female lead (who still has significant issues by the end, but at least is addressing some of them). I considered putting it on the lowest level of my annual recommendation list, which is where I've put books with sound storytelling but bad editing before.

This isn't just badly edited, though. It's inept sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility, and absolutely not ready for publication; it would take, I estimate, a month's solid work by someone skilled to even get close. As always, I feel bound to note that the books I get from Netgalley may, theoretically, receive more editing after I see them and before publication, but this one has so many issues that there's no way it can be fixed in the time, so I'm giving it my "seriously-needs-editing" tag in the confidence that it will still seriously need editing when it's published a couple of weeks from now. Taking that into account, it gets three stars, and lucky to have the third one.

I enjoyed the story.
The characters were well rounded, the different POVs were interesting.
The story concept was really intriguing!

Curtsies & Consequences is a MUST READ! This is a wonderful book which paints a retelling of a tale as old as time. The captivating story opens with Princess Kira posing as a terrifying beast and then winds through a Royal society where magic and fairies are common place. From beginning to end it held my interest with strong character development, relationships, and mystery. Chapter after chapter I found myself wondering what I would do if I was in Kira's shoes. I was completely unaware of time as I read, completely immersed in the powerful prose of Melissa Constantine's writing. The thoughts and actions of each character evoked a feeling of relatability, I cared very much if Sir Handsome Hair would connect the dots from princess to beast or if Bertie and Xav would make it through. (I NEED BOOK TWO!) , This book is the reason I read books, in hopes they are as thought provokingly happy and exciting.

What I love:
-This is a unique story - it's very creative and hilarious.
-I need chocolate now.
-Feminist plotline.
-I have already laughed out loud at least three times and I'm not even on page 40 yet.
-I have yet to see any sort of trigger. There is a family death, but it's only in reference to the past.
-The representation!!!
-The humor is everything. EVERYTHING.


What kept it from being 5 stars (I changed my score since finishing this book, a rare occurrence!!):

-Hard to keep track of the characters (this may be a personal preference as I am bad with names in real life as well). I couldn't knock the author for this as I started to get more comfortable with the characters over time. A little list of characters before the start of the book or at the end could be helpful.

-The book was slightly confusing at times as to what was happening. This can be the fault of the writer, but can also be the fault of the reader. In this case, I believe it was my fault because this writing style is different from what I am used to (books I typically read).


+++++
Ok, I just finished this book. I started it this morning. I am a fast reader, but I have been engrossed in this work of art all day long.

I will need to keep up with the series, because this was such an enjoyable read.

I am also addicted to coffee, and Robert and Kira will be living in my head rent-free for the foreseeable future.