by Sarah Cross
Published on April 10th 2012
EgmontUSA, 336 pages
Find the title on Goodreads
Mirabelle's past is shrouded in secrecy, from her parents' tragic deaths to her guardians' half-truths about why she can't return to her birthplace, Beau Rivage. Desperate to see the town, Mira runs away a week before her sixteenth birthday—and discovers a world she never could have imagined.
In Beau Rivage, nothing is what it seems—the strangely pale girl with a morbid interest in apples, the obnoxious playboy who's a beast to everyone he meets, and the chivalrous guy who has a thing for damsels in distress. Here, fairy tales come to life, curses are awakened, and ancient stories are played out again and again.
— Goodreads.com description
You. Girls. This. Book. Will. Left. You. Totally. In. Awe.
Because seriously. It's beautiful. It's so so beautiful. As a girl, with the word fairytale in her blog title, this book was everything I wanted and wished for and more. I picked it up, because of the romance, but I was left with an incredible desire for more fairytales and more daydreaming about them. This book wasn't about romance at all (well, at least not as much as I thought it was).
This book was about fate, courage, risks, friendship, and so much more. It's about a girl which leaves her home to find her parents grave. A girl how's searching for closure. A girl who is searching for the truth and peace. And discovers a totally new world around her.
Mira. She is so courageous. She left in the middle of the night one week before her 16th birthday to go searching for the grave of her parents. Alone. With no plan. If that isn't badass, then really, I don't know anything at all. And she comes in a new town with totally different people living there. And even when Blue threatened her to leave the town for good, she doesn't give up on her dreams and stays. True, she made some bad decisions, but it's also true that she faced the consequences with her head held high.
This book is about fate and about people who struggle to fight the fate in their life. But as they say, »Our lives are like that. It feels like we can do what we want—but if we venture in a new direction, fate pulls us back. We can rebel, but we all know we’ll fail. Which doesn’t stop us from trying, I guess.« But, as I said, this is fairytale land and sometimes we just need some faith and hope for things to change for better. And we should always believe in magic.
Some quotes that I will keep close to my heart, hopefully, forever:
"It was hard to be honest, to open up, and reveal something that sounded crazy. Because once you told someone the truth, that person had a piece of you—and they could belittle it, destroy it. They could turn your confession into a wound that never healed."
"You couldn’t hide from bad things and pretend they didn’t exist—that left you with a dream world, and dream worlds eventually crumbled. You had to face the truth. And then decide what you wanted."
"A naked blade hid nothing, feared nothing. She wanted to be like that. Because that was how you found yourself, created yourself. You didn’t hide. You didn’t wait for the perfect moment to settle on you like a butterfly, like magic.
You went out and made magic. Made your own wishes come true."
