Reviewing Curse of the Wolf King by Tessonja Odette.
Curse of the Wolf King is a Beauty & The Beast retelling with Fae elements. (Definitely contains spoilers.)
I was cat-fished by my favorite trope and left for dead.
“Yes, it’s worth it. The good and the bad. It’s the story as a whole that matters.”
― Tessonja Odette, Curse of the Wolf King
Look, having ADHD and a deep love for reading is not an ideal combination. It’s taken me quite some time (and quite a lot of “Please hide packages from my fiancé!” delivery preferences) to bridge the gap and regain the same dedication I had to reading as an adult that I had when I was a child. In that journey I have discovered books that I adore, and books that I hate. So, in my dutiful service to the rest of my ADHD picky-reading community, let me save you the self-loathing and wasted hyper-fixation.
It's so cute. Sickly cute. Cover your eyes so we don't corrupt you, cute.
In a short synopsis, our main heroin Gemma Bellefleur meets the Fae King of the Winter Court in the magical land of Faerwyvae. She discovers that he is cursed to lose his powers that allow him and his court to live as Fae Wolves unless he gives up that which is most treasured to him, or finds a human that is willing to sacrifice their own greatest treasure in his stead. And true to its Beauty & The Beast nature, the Fae King is a grumpy hard-to-love type. Gemma is beautiful and headstrong. You know the rest of the story.
“There’s no room for me, not when society has already decided who and what I should be. A daughter. A woman. A wife-in-training. Quiet. Demure. Chaste.”
― Tessonja Odette, Curse of the Wolf King
As an individual who typically has to navigate her ever-changing fictional obsessions like she’s trying to find her way through David Bowie’s Labyrinth, I can’t seem to shake the enemies-to-lovers trope lately. Falling in love with your sweet best friend that has secretly been in love with you for you for years? Not interested. Nearly murdering each other in a sword fight, but give it a few chapters and they’re burning the world down if anyone lays a hand on you? Please and thank you – and make them share a horse.
Perhaps there’s some other underlying psycho-divergences to attribute to that current fascination, but hey, when it works – it works.
This is the path that, of course, led me into the arms of Curse of the Wolf King. I’ve always loved a good stand-alone Beauty & The Beast retelling to cleanse my pallet between series. (My favorite retelling and one that I recommend is Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge, btw.)
This is a book that I feel like I finished out of spite.
My brain functions on an all-or-nothing interest spectrum. That being said, in order to keep my interest, I need a book to have ridiculously high stakes and a nearly unattainable higher reward.
My first issue with this book was that it made me feel like I was reading a screenplay for a children’s Disney Channel sitcom – and I mean that in every sense that I possibly can. Every conflict and every obstacle seemed to have a too-easily obtainable resolution that was readily awaiting the main characters long before they had reached the end. I felt like Odette relied so much on her reader’s familiarity with the Beauty & The Beast trope that she forgot to give her characters and plot believable motivation.
The main characters were so two-dimensional that trying to empathize or even like them was almost as painful as reading their cheesy and unnatural dialogue. As the Fae King of the Winter Court, some winter-esque persona was to be expected; even graciously tolerated. However, I found the use of her euphemistic snow-themed quips (such as, “Oh, would you freeze off?!”) atrociously unforgivable for a love interest that I should have found dripping in brooding attractiveness. (Insert a clever analogy about taking a cold shower here.)
Perhaps slightly redeemable, the allusions to the great Jane Eyre.
Her comparing the King to Mr. Rochester of my beloved Jane Eyre felt like a re-casting of Pride & Prejudice with 2012 Justin Bieber playing Darcy. No hate to Biebs, but even he would admit that he’s no Matthew Macfadyen stalking across a field in the morning mist to declare his love.
Overall, I found the story (unfortunately) disappointing and unsatisfying for my personal taste. I don’t know if it was the teeny-tiny kernels of redeemable hope littered throughout the story, or my sheer unwillingness to believe that one of my favorite tropes could let me down, but something pushed me onto the end.
Which, by the way, ends with Gemma rescuing the wolfy King from his demise by literally being simply willing to sacrifice her greatest treasure for him. No sacrificing is actually done. No stakes. No reward. The End. It crumbles the entire foundation of the entire story arch in the cheapest fashion.
Overall, 2 stars out of 5.
If I could rate it against my favorite books on a scale of 1-10, I would give it a merciful 4. A lot of those points are riding on a single ballroom scene that I actually did find to be lovely and adorable. It is an easy, quick read that piqued enough of my deficit attention to keep it from collecting dust unfinished on my bookshelf.
Perhaps if Curse of the Wolf King and I had found each other sooner, in the wake of my innocence and budding romantic hopelessness, I would be able to hold it in higher regard. Unfortunately, finding me here as a woman tainted by the world and dreadful reality, that was not the case. Curse of the Wolf King left me wishing for everything it had the potential to offer but did not succeed in delivering.
If my brain is a garage, then my ADHD is the unpacked moving boxes constantly multiplying behind your back and stacked floor to ceiling. If I’m going to re-read every other paragraph five or six times before the words break through the nearly impenetrable wall of thought-clutter, it had better offer me something meatier than a cliché loophole and Brad Pitt with a Jack Frost persona.
I’m a simple gal.
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