Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Language:  A few instances of profanity; just about every other swear word but the f-word used at least once.  Other crass language (skank, piss, slut).   The bad language does not permeate the book, but is enough to give literate mothers pause.

Violence:  The beast attacks the witch after she transforms him; he has a temper and lashes out at people and breaks things.  He watches (through a magic mirror) a father physically and emotionally abuse his daughter.  The beast breaks a girl’s arm at a dance.  He is attacked by subway passengers and lashes out at them.  A man threatens and points a gun at the girl he loves and the beast attacks him to save her.

Sexual Content:  Kyle, the main character, says that school proms are a form of “legalized prostitution.”  Kyle uses crass talk when referring to situations between him and his girlfriend, i.e. “…in return, I get some,” school dance chaperones “keep us from mating on the dance floor,”  her hand on him was headed “toward the Danger Zone,”  “going for the crotch again,” someone suggests a “threesome.”  Kyle watches naked girls through his magic mirror.  When searching for a girl online to break the spell, pay sex sites pop up and women send him naked pictures.  He overhears guys at the dance talking about “what they had in their pockets and who they’d use them on.”  He imagines “tangling [Lindy’s] body with his.”

Adult Themes:  Kyle’s mother left his father to run off with another man.  Kyle and his girlfriend drink vodka at her parent’s house after the dance.  Rape is discussed very briefly, and castration as punishment.  Lindy’s druggie father abuses her; her “slut” sisters had run off to live with their boyfriends.  Kyle discusses a gay writer (Oscar Wilde) with his tutor.   A drug dealer breaks into Kyle’s house and offers him drugs.  In the end of the book, it is mentioned that Lindy has moved in with Kyle to get away from her drug-addicted father.  (She has a separate bedroom, but both Lindy and Kyle are still in high school.)

Synopsis

Kyle Kingsbury, a Manhattan freshman at an elite prep school, describes himself as the guy with money, perfect looks, and the perfect life, “The guy you wished you were.”  He treats everyone badly and laughs about it, having no sympathy for anyone less endowed than him in either looks or money.  That is, until the day a Gothic-looking girl at his school casts a horrible spell on him and turns him into a beast (sound familiar?).  Now he has two years to find someone he can love and who loves him in return for who he is–the classic spell-breaking love in fairy tales.  So Kyle’s dad moves him out of their Manhattan apartment and into a Brooklyn brownstone where he holes himself up with nothing but books, the internet, and the magic mirror the witch gave him and no one but a cook/maid and a blind tutor.  In the meantime, he transforms on the inside from a horrid, egotistical jerk into a sensitive, literary, rose-loving, gardening, sweet-but-hairy-on-the-outside kind of guy.  When a drug dealer breaks into his house and fears for his life in the clutches of the Beast, he offers his teenage daughter in exchange for his life (really?!)  Along comes Lindy, the average-looking, smart girl with a gentle touch and a love of books who sees past his beastly exterior and into his now-refined heart of gold .  Bet you can’t guess the ending.

The author paints such an annoying picture of Kyle in the beginning of the book, you almost want to put the book down.  I suppose that was intended, so that the reader will relish watching his sanctifying transformation.  Of course he becomes the lovable, perfect guy in the end who falls for the ordinary girl that every girl reading this book thinks she is.  It’s a nice, familiar story that doesn’t disappoint in the end, but it could have been just as good without the crude language and sex talk.  I also found it hard to believe that a 16-year-old couple could find true love that would last forever and that they were living together in the same enormous house by story’s end with no apparent parental supervision.  These are themes I would not recommend adolescent girls to indulge in.