STALKING SHADOWS

This new take on “Beauty and the Beast” puts teen girls at the forefront.

Marie Michaud sells homemade perfumes at the town market, saving up for a dowry for her younger sister, Ama. But select bottles are enhanced with honeysuckle and given only to Ama’s prey. Last year, Marie’s more beautiful sister was sold to the wealthy LaClaire family to work off the debts of the girls’ father. Fifteen-year-old Ama returned half-girl, half-beast, and now Marie helps her sister find and mark men who won’t be missed during Ama’s monthly transformation. But when a small boy is found dead in the square—younger and bearing completely different wounds than Ama’s usual prey—Marie seeks to both protect Ama from unjust punishment and others from her increasingly hungry sister. Marie offers her services to the remaining LaClaire family members—young Lucien, who suffers from consumption, and Lucien’s handsome older brother, Sebastian, who’s struggling to manage the townspeople’s gossip after his parents’ mysterious deaths during Ama’s tenure as a servant—in hopes of finding Madame LaClaire’s spell book and curing Ama once and for all. Though the story tends to get bogged down in details and backstory, Panin's debut features rich, complex teen characters, all fighting to be understood within the limits of their small, closed-minded town. Most characters in this fantasy French setting default to White; Sebastian and Lucien are mixed-race (their mother came from Martinique and is cued as Black).

A fairy-tale retelling that’s both beautiful and brutal.