This retelling reads like a spooky version of “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” with a dash of Nordic draugar folklore as twisted by someone who loves Horror stories.

And, surprisingly, I liked it even though I dislike Horror.

What stands out in this story is the sisterhood amongst the women of the town, who protect and help each other, and what they are willing to do to save themselves and their friends from the blight that is coming to them for breaking a pact with a divine force. I especially liked that, although there’s romance in this book (or it wouldn’t be a true retelling of the fairy tale), it doesn’t overshadow or take precedence over Isobel’s most important relationship, which is the one she has with her best friend Rose. She fights tooth and nail for Rose as well as for the Bear King. One doesn’t exclude the other, proving that you can do sorority and romance both without taking away from a story being about the women first and foremost. Even the fact that the villain is eventually revealed to be a woman is also part of this emphasis on the girls as important beings, and the villainess is given motives that align with her personality and her desire to achieve her goals at any cost, sacrificing anyone in betrayal of all these bonds.

Another plot point I appreciated was that the in-world lore of the curse is quite original compared to what’s usually written in retellings of this Scandinavian Beauty & Beast variant. I liked how the spell is broken and why; it was well thought out, and not so easy to guess for me. The concept of the Bear Brides is simply an idea I never saw before that I heartily loved, though of couse I felt like I needed more explanations about them than I got from the pages.

Finally, the atmosphere here is superb. The tension and dread that build up and increase until the resolution of both the revenge plot and the breaking of the curse plot are well-crafted. It’s a very small but vibrant world, and you can really “feel” its vitality.

As a negative, the build-up of the romance between Isobel and Finn was weak, in my opinion. This has more to do with the pacing of the entire book than with their relationship alone (which is slow-burn from the start but since the book isn’t long, you can picture the rush by the end), but it’s also due to a weakness in the characterisation, because it’s not very convincing that these two fall in love so suddenly and in such a way like it’s depicted here.

The pacing is generally poor, and the book needed more editing and proofreading to smooth out its structural cracks because it seems they rushed to publish it as is. Furthermore, whilst the Horror atmosphere is very good, not so much the worldbuilding. Some things are left unexplained (a lot about the Bear Brides and this world’s gods, for example) or revealed abruptly without preamble, which detracts significantly from this otherwise beautifully compact little world.

The author could always republish this in an improved and fully edited new version, and I hope she does, because I’m not making this comment for the sake of saying something about pace & edition. The flaws really are eviden even for a non-professional in writing and editing, and I’m rating this on the handling of the retelling aspects alone.