This book came to me at the end of a long series of mediocre B&B retellings, and I had no expectations that it would be the exception. However, it was. It has one of the most memorable Beauties I’ve seen in years.

Many authors love to make their Beauty bookish, and they love even more to copy the famous scene from the Disney film where Beast makes the castle library available to Belle, and I don’t blame them. Who amongst us bookworms hasn’t dreamed of a library as beautiful and grand as that?

But the problem is that they either tend to make their Beauty lack the intellect to deserve such a dream library or make her being bookish into her entire personality. In these cases, the homage to the Disney library scene is merely decorative.

This isn’t the case in Once Upon an Enchanted Castle. In this book, Beauty not only has the intellect to make use of Beast’s library, but she also has a personality beyond being bookish that complements her love of reading: Isabella Rinaldi is a linguist, and not just any linguist but one who specialises in rare and extinct languages.

This detail is spectacular, and for me the best part of the story. At first, the plot of the book sticks so closely to the original fairy tale that I was a little afraid it would end up being a cute and unoriginal romantic retelling like so many in Victorian and Austenian retellings. And whilst it’s true that the book’s plot does indeed stick fairly closely to the fairy tale’s Beaumont version, there are significant differences and it’s not as tied to the checklist of elements to copy from it as I had feared.

It all begins with the nice touch of giving Isabella a gift for languages and making her practically an empirical professional linguist, which I really liked (of course, I’m not impartial in this regard, as I am a polyglot myself and learnt some of the languages I know throughout my life on my own). One day, her merchant father brings her a gift from one of his travels: a beautiful book in a language that no one knows or can read, with a strange writing system that combines roses with thorns and has a very striking cover with an engraved rose with open petals. Her father tells her that it will be a good challenge to decipher it, and Isabella is delighted and immediately sets about trying to read these strange pictograms and hieroglyphics.

But the book is cursed, which she doesn’t suspect.

A series of misfortunes befalls the family, misfortunes that follow the course of what happens to the merchant’s family in the fairy tale. Isabella begins to suspect that the book has something to do with these inexplicable disasters, and tries to sell the book to a dealer in rare objects. It is there that she meets Leopold, another person with an apparent interest in rare books, who takes a look at the book she’s trying to sell and hires her as a translator of rare books in his castle library.

But Leopold is also cursed, which she doesn’t suspect either.

What I find funny is that here we have two men vying for Isabella’s heart, and both use her love of languages to get to her, as both Leopold and Lord Vincent hire her as a translator for the rare books they both collect, but in reality both have hidden intentions towards her, and the “job” they hire her for is a means to an end. It’s amusing, but also a little uncomfortable because you get the feeling that neither of these two men respects her very much as strictly a translator, even though they both admire her intellect.

Personally, I sympathised a little more with Lord Vincent, who was courting her in a clumsy but well-meaning Victorian way, so I didn’t like the villainous elements that appeared and the dark twist the author gave to his character. It was too forced for my taste, very Gaston-like, when he seemed to be an honourable rival until then. He should’ve remained a worthy and honourable rival instead of what he ended up being, because it’s obvious that it was done to favour Leopold’s character. These authors urgently need to learn how to create rivalries over a lady’s favour without undeservedly villainising one man in favour of the other.

The reason I sympathised more with Vincent than with Leopold at first is because it’s revealed too early on—barely 31% of the way through the book—that he’s cursed, and we find out because he tells Isabella near immediately upon her arrival at Thornhurst to work as a translator. And to top it off, he doesn’t even bother to explain how or why he’s cursed. She has to figure it all out for herself, and she does so too soon: she sees the rose on the library table and realises it is the same one on the cover of the book with the language of roses and thorns, and immediately knows she’s dealing with a supernatural force.

And that fool Leopold confesses everything about his curse: he was a prince who was condemned to be a shapeshifting beast to save his brother from a dark force that was reawakening in his kingdom. Well, so far so good, but then why on Earth did you need a woman, or rather the love of a woman, to break this curse?

Love is what the curse could never bind, that’s the “great mystery” in the book of roses and thorns that Isabella translates, and the strangest thing is that to break it she has to tell the book that she loves Leopold. Not speak to Leopold himself but speak to the book. If the curse wasn’t about appearances and anything, why exactly does it need love to break the beastly condition?

Honestly, it irritates me so much that it isn’t understood that the curse cannot be broken specifically with the love of a woman when the conditions of the curse were not originally those. If you’re going to have a woman break it, make the conditions have to do with a woman’s love. If you’re going to make the conditions any other type of non-romantic emotional bond, make it so that any type of non-romantic emotional bond can break the curse.

This vagueness is I did definitely not like. It’s hard to see why Isabella ends up falling in love with that chap, because she interacts with him just enough. Out of pity? Because of plot demands? Because he’s handsome and rich? Anything! But not because they have chemistry. And what they did to Vincent was overkill for me, again very Gaston-like, even though he had reasons to think badly of Leopold if you look at it from the point of view that he hasn’t been known in society in centuries and claims to be a nobleman.

I also didn’t like that Isabella’s linguistic gift wasn’t explored much, and was ultimately a plot device to favour Leopold. She knows those weird languages just to break that silly curse even though the intention is that she’s great at it and can work and earn a living through it. We should’ve seen more of her working on the translation, more of the mystery of the origin of the language should’ve been revealed (Now that I think about it, do we even know what kind of culture it was and why they wrote with roses and thorns?), she should’ve struggled more to translate the book or even identify the language, it should’ve been harder for her to learn everything, and it shouldn’t have been served to her on a gold platter at the castle.

There should’ve been a bloody Rosetta Stone at least! Translating a language you don’t speak and that no one knows is very difficult. I spent a year learning a little Ancient Greek and just being able to read its alphabet took me a lot of effort, and we’re talking about a language for which there are thousands of books and even dictionaries to help you, unlike that rose-and-thorns one, which has nothing at all and is otherworldly to boot.

Well, at least I can say that Isabella and her linguistic skills made the book work for me overall. As my friend Meishuu would say, paraphrasing, “she’s a great character trapped in a mediocre script.” And that’s how it is, she’s an excellent character but not so much the romance she is thrown into.