Title: Beastly: Lindy’s Diary
Author: Alex Flinn
Series: Kendra Chronicles #1.5
Rating Out of 5: 4.5 (Amazing, but not quite perfect)
My Bookshelves: Easy reading, Fairy tales
Pace: Slow
Format: Novella
Publisher: Harper Teen
Year: 2012
5th sentence, 74th page: Now I did.

See the #1 New York Times bestselling story Beastly through Lindy’s eyes! This is her diary, kept while living in captivity with the beast. Lindy’s Diary captures all the romance and edgy mystery of the original!

Diary,

I am locked away . . . with no one to confide in but you . . . and him. His fur, those claws—they caught me off guard at first, but now I’m noticing something else about him—something deeper. It’s the look in his eye. It tells me he’s got a secret to keep. That’s okay—I’ve got one, too. I think I’m falling in love with him. . . .

Lindy

It’s always fun to reread a story from a different person’s point of view. It just gives a nice, different point of view and lens through which to watch the same actions that you have already watched, and often thought you understood. When it’s a novella that tells the other side of a romance, then it just makes me all the more happier. Lindy’s Diary does this.

I love Beauty and the Beast, whichever version it happens to be. I love the idea of two outcasts finding one another and finding solace in each others’ company. It’s not about Stockholme Syndrome (just had to throw that one out there). And I love the idea that true love is about two souls, not the way that each other looks. But, attraction is a physical thing too. I think that my partner is a gorgeous man. Now that I know him, I know that I would love him regardless. I don’t know if I would have fallen for him regardless of his looks. I don’t know how the process would have happened in the case of Beauty and the Beast. Lindy’s Diary helped to make me understand this. It was also a nice way to see why she held off with saying the magical words.

Sometimes diary formats kind of annoy me – they can be read quite clunkily and just don’t have the flow that I love in well-written prose. I wouldn’t have liked the tale of Beastly written as a diary. It would have made the story a little too time-conscious and the time passages would have felt almost lazy in missing out chunks of time to move the story forward. After all, the tale takes place over a two year time period. But as a brief glimpse into Lindy’s thoughts and feelings, it works really well. It places the actions of Adrian within the context of their year together and helps to show how Lindy falling in love was a slow and gradual progress.

Image source: Harper Collins Publishers