The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey

The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey

This is another version of the Beauty and the Beast story. Rosalind Hawkins, or Rose, as she’s later called, is in a desperate situation and has to accept employment as a governess/translator/secretary to a reclusive employer, who was horribly disfigured in an accident.

Later on, we find out he’s not really disfigured in the sense we expect, but transformed into a half-lupine, half-human form. They fall in love, despite many enemies and dangers along the way.

This was a tough book to read. Not tough in the sense of challenging, but because it was a struggle to keep myself interested in it. It wasn’t boring, exactly, but it just didn’t hold my interest well.

Many times I wanted to give up on it, but it wasn’t all that bad and I did want to find out what happens in the end. Unfortunately, now I wonder if I wasn’t better off spending my time reading some other more interesting book.

The story is an interesting one, I’ve always been partial to the Beauty and the Beast story myself, and the added elements (pun intended) of magick, Masters of Elements, and the Elementals, did make the story a lot more interesting than it would’ve been.

Perhaps it was in the way the story was told. Perhaps there was too much magick history that we were subjected to, and perhaps a lot of it didn’t really make sense and weren’t very consistent. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is exactly that I don’t like about the book, but it may well be just me. I definitely hope that others who read it would like it a lot better than I did.