HOL

Title: As Old as Time
Author: Liz Braswell
Series: Twisted Tales
Genre: Fantasy/Adventure

Short Summary:
This is the third book of Liz Braswell's Twisted Tales Series. She takes original Disney stories and brings twists to them. If you remember as a child, Belle is this very smart and talented woman of a small city, who lives with her father. She is deemed odd to the villagers, but yet has the eyes of the handsome Gaston. Her father is held hostage by a beast after losing his horse, while on his way to a fair. Belle travels to save her father and then becomes the prisoner of the beast. In this, Braswell brings in the question if the Enchantress was Belle's mother.

Here is Goodreads' summary:

What if Belle’s mother cursed the Beast?

Belle is a lot of things: smart, resourceful, restless. She longs to escape her poor provincial town for good. She wants to explore the world, despite her father’s reluctance to leave their little cottage in case Belle’s mother returns—a mother she barely remembers. Belle also happens to be the captive of a terrifying, angry beast. And that is her primary concern.

But Belle touches the Beast’s enchanted rose, intriguing images flood her mind—images of the mother she believed she would never see again. Stranger still, she sees that her mother is none other than the beautiful Enchantress who cursed the Beast, his castle, and all its inhabitants. Shocked and confused, Belle and the Beast must work together to unravel a dark mystery about their families that is twenty-one years in the making.

Reading this, I was expecting some of the material to be the same. There were many times I kept asking myself: why did the author put this unnecessary detail in here? It was then that I understood the reason why Liz Braswell described the plot the way she did. At some points, I did feel like a kid and this reminded me, reverting my mind back to the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Braswell did preserve the characters as they originally were and then it felt like these characters lost their sparks.

This did start really good...I was sucked into it!, and then it came to several points, I had to put the book down to get back into reading it.

Still an interesting read and if you are a huge Beauty and the Beast fan, you should give this a try