Hunted by Meagan Spooner

🌟🌟🌟🌓 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones—and in her blood. Though she grew up with the city’s highest aristocrats, far from her father’s old lodge, she knows that the forest holds secrets and that her father is the only hunter who’s ever come close to discovering them. 

So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. Out in the wilderness, there’s no pressure to make idle chatter with vapid baronessas…or to submit to marrying a wealthy gentleman. But Yeva’s father’s misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he’d been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance. 

Deaf to her sisters’ protests, Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory—a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva’s only heard about in fairy tales. A world that can bring her ruin or salvation. Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast?

Hunted reminded me of a mix between Beauty and the Beast and The Wrath and the Dawn. She is a prisoner motivated by revenge. She wants the beast to pay for what he has done and will not stop until she has what she wants. I thought that Hunted was an interesting take on the classic fairy tale but I would have liked to have seen more of a departure from the original story. The story did hold my attention but I would have liked for it to grab my attention more so. I thought that Yeva was a fun character albeit a bit bland. Instead of being a bookworm she showed her differences from society by loving the woods and wanting to talk to others about hunting rather than gossip and the weather. I loved the fact that Megan Spooner decided not to have a Gaston character in the story and that she addressed the Stockholm syndrome that everyone points out with regards to this particular fairy tale.  I thought that it was a nice touch and added realism to the book that I feel other books lack. 
I was intrigued by the lesson or moral that the author chose to focus the story on because I felt that it was different than the other versions. It seems like they seem to focus on loving a person for more than their looks or looking past their flaws to the beauty beneath. Hunted was centered around finding happiness in your life rather than constantly seeking more. I also thought that the ending of the book tied into this message nicely. It was laid out in a very clever manner.