As Old As Time by Liz Braswell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
An imaginative twist on the ‘tale as old as time’ that we all know and love!
As Old As Time, the third installment in Disney’s Twisted Tales series puts forth the question, what if Belle’s mom was the one to curse the Beast?
Following the parameters of a fairly strict retelling, this story has bonus content!
Music to any fan’s ears. We get a back and forth timeline here, one following Belle in the present part of the story we are familiar with, and the other telling of Belle’s parents before she was born.
The Belle we know is without a mother, living with her father, an inventor, on the outskirts of town.
But of course Belle once had a mother. This reimagining tells who she was, the Enchantress that cursed the Beast.
We learn about the kingdom at a time when magic was still present, as well as about the Beast’s parents and their unkind rule over their kingdom.
There is a plague and a fairly harsh ‘witch hunt’, for lack of a better term, that all ultimately leads to the Beast’s curse.
As I mentioned earlier, this felt like bonus content to the Disney animated version from 1991 because a good portion of this stuck so true to that original.
The rest was icing on the cake, filling in the back story of the time before the movie kicks off. I really appreciated that.
Some retellings you want to be wildly creative and unique (e.g. Hunted by Meagan Spooner or Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust), but for this series, the point is to have the original story with one twist that affects the outcome.
I thought that was well done here by Braswell.
I’m a sucker for this series and will continue to pick them up. This is definitely one of my favorites!
If you love the original animated Beauty and the Beast as much as I do, you should definitely give this one a try!
