A Curse So Dark and Lonely

I came to this one because I wanted a Beauty and the Beast retelling that did not feel like a copy with new names. A friend told me the girl in this version has cerebral palsy and carries a limp into every fight scene, and that hooked me. The book is the first in the Cursebreakers series, published by Bloomsbury in 2019, and the hardcover runs 496 pages. It turned out to be part fairy tale, part castle politics, part slow romance, with a lot of time spent on what it means to trust someone when you have good reason not to.

What surprised me most is how much of the story belongs to Harper, not the prince. Rhen has lived the same season hundreds of times. Harper has lived one hard life in Washington DC. When those two timelines crash into each other, the book gets interesting, and it stays interesting even when the middle gets a little repetitive.

Washington DC and the night everything changes

Harper lives in Washington DC with her brother Jake and their mother, who is dying. Her father has been gone a long time. Money is tight. Jake works and worries and tries to keep the family together, and part of how he copes is by treating Harper like she is fragile. She is not fragile. She has cerebral palsy, which affects one leg and gives her a visible limp, and she has spent years learning what she can do and what hurts. She knows how to move through a bad part of town. She knows how to talk back. She hates being underestimated, especially by Jake, who loves her but keeps trying to wrap her in padding.

The opening chapters stay in our world long enough to make Harper feel real. She helps care for her mother. She argues with Jake about bills and plans that never quite work. She has a sharp tongue and a habit of stepping in when someone else is in trouble, even when it would be smarter to keep walking. That habit is what gets her taken.

One night she sees a man grab a girl on the street and she intervenes. She expects a fight with a stranger. What she gets is Grey, a quiet man with a sword and a tired face, who is not from DC at all. He was in the middle of taking another girl back to Emberfall for Rhen. Harper gets in the way, Grey grabs Harper instead, and suddenly she is somewhere else entirely. No phone signal. No familiar streets. Stone walls, cold air, servants who stare, and a young man who looks like he has been waiting for her for years, because in a way he has.

I liked that Kemmerer does not make Harper accept this quickly. Harper assumes she has been kidnapped. She looks for exits. She asks for a phone, for police, for a way home. She clocks every door and weapon. It takes a while before she believes any talk of curses, and even then she treats Rhen like a suspect first and a prince second. That skepticism carries a lot of the early book and makes her easy to root for.

Emberfall, Ironrose, and the rules Rhen lives by

Emberfall is Rhen's kingdom, and Ironrose Castle is where most of the story happens. When Harper arrives, the castle feels half empty. There are few servants left. The land outside is tense. The season is autumn, always autumn, because Rhen is living the same autumn over and over.

The curse works like this. Lilith, a powerful enchantress, punished Rhen when he was eighteen for cruelty and arrogance. He must relive that autumn until a girl falls in love with him. Grey, commander of his guard and really his last loyal friend, goes into our world each cycle to bring back a girl to try to break it. If the season ends without love, Rhen turns into a huge violent beast that destroys everything around him, people included, and then the season resets. His family is gone. His soldiers are gone. His hope is mostly gone too.

Rhen is nineteen in body but much older in experience. He has tried charm. He has tried honesty. He has tried distance. Nothing has worked for hundreds of cycles. When Harper meets him, he is polite in a formal way that feels rusty, like someone who learned manners for a court that no longer exists. He offers her a room, clothes, food, freedom to walk the castle grounds. He also watches her constantly for signs that she might be the one, which Harper notices and resents.

Grey is the steadier presence. He trains, stands watch, manages the castle, and covers for Rhen when Rhen loses control. He has his own doubts about the whole system. Dragging girls from another world into a doomed castle season after season has worn him down. He is kind to Harper without pushing her toward Rhen, and that matters. Harper trusts Grey first, before she trusts Rhen, and the book lets that happen slowly.

Lilith shows up in person, which I did not expect. She is not a distant curse maker. She can walk into Ironrose, threaten people, hurt people, and remind Rhen who holds power. Every time she appears, the temperature of the book drops. She likes games. She likes making Rhen beg. She also likes Harper, in the way a cat likes a new bird, and Harper learns fast that arguing with Lilith has a price.

Learning the castle and learning each other

A big chunk of the middle is Harper settling in and testing limits. She explores Ironrose. She meets the few remaining staff. She learns that Emberfall outside the walls is struggling, with villages short on food and soldiers stretched thin. She learns that many people in Emberfall do not know about the repeating season. For them, time moves on. Only Rhen and Grey remember every cycle, which is lonely in a way the book sits with.

Harper starts training with Grey because she refuses to be helpless in a place full of swords. Her limp changes how she fights. She cannot move like Grey, so they work on balance, knives, close defense, reading an opponent. These scenes take up a lot of pages. Some readers will love them. I thought they ran a bit long, but they do something important. They show Harper earning respect instead of being handed it, and they give her and Grey a friendship built on sweat and jokes rather than court talk.

Her time with Rhen is different. They ride out to villages. They talk to farmers and innkeepers. They argue about ruling, about duty, about whether fear keeps people loyal. Rhen shows her the parts of Emberfall he loves, and Harper sees that he does love his people, even if his early cruelty helped cause this mess. She also sees his temper. He can be cold when he feels cornered. He can shut down. Harper calls him on it, which no one else does anymore, and he hates it and needs it at the same time.

The romance builds the slow way. Shared meals. Long walks. A dance lesson that goes badly and then a little better. Harper noticing small things, like how Rhen talks to an old servant, or how he looks away when Lilith is mentioned. Rhen noticing that Harper does not flatter him, does not scare easy, and does not pretend her leg is fine when it hurts. There is attraction, but the book keeps asking whether attraction under pressure counts. Harper knows she was brought there to fall in love. That knowledge poisons every kind moment. How can she tell what she feels on her own? How can Rhen tell if she stays because she wants to or because she cannot get home? Kemmerer does not rush past those questions, and I appreciated that.

There is also a sweet thread with the castle staff and townspeople. A seamstress who adjusts dresses for Harper's brace and leg without fuss. Guards who teach her dice games. Kids in a village who stare at her limp and then ask her about DC. These smaller moments break up the training and the tense dinners and remind you what Rhen stands to lose if the season fails again.

Lilith keeps raising the price

Just when Harper starts to feel almost safe, Lilith reminds everyone who is in charge. She visits Ironrose without warning. She threatens Harper's family back in DC in vague ways that scare Harper more than any sword. She toys with Rhen, offering hints about how the curse could end while changing the terms in small cruel ways. One of the hardest scenes for me involved Lilith hurting someone close to Rhen just to prove she can, and Rhen having to stand there and take it because fighting back would make things worse.

This is where the book shifts from romance to politics. Emberfall is not only cursed. It is also in danger from Syhl Shallow, the neighboring land ruled by Karis Luran. Her soldiers press at the borders. Her spies show up in villages. Rhen has to play prince even as his curse clock runs down, meeting with lords, hearing complaints, trying to hold alliances together with no army to back him. Harper watches him do this and starts to understand the weight he carries. It is one thing to feel sorry for a cursed boy in a castle. It is another to watch him try to govern while knowing he might turn into a monster and kill the same people he is trying to protect.

Grey gets more complicated here too. He follows orders, but he questions them. He has seen too many girls brought to Ironrose and sent home broken or worse. He likes Harper and worries Rhen is pinning too much on her. There are hints that Grey remembers more than he says and that his past ties into the larger conflict with Syhl Shallow. The book does not resolve all of that, since Grey becomes central in the second book, but it plants enough that I kept an eye on him in every scene.

Harper also tries to find a way home, and that thread never fully goes away. She misses Jake and her mother. She feels guilty for vanishing, even though she was taken. She asks Grey how the crossings work. She tests boundaries around the castle grounds. Part of her starts to care about Emberfall, and part of her is angry that caring might trap her there. That split feels honest. Anyone who has cared for a sick parent while trying to live their own life will recognize the guilt Harper carries.

The last weeks of the season

The final quarter moves fast after the slow middle. As autumn runs out, Rhen gets more desperate and less careful. He pushes Harper to feel more, faster, which backfires. Harper pulls back. Grey tries to mediate. Lilith circles. News from the borders gets worse. A planned trip outside the castle goes wrong in a way that exposes how little control Rhen has left, and Harper has to decide whether to run when she gets a chance or stay and fight for people who are not technically her people.

I will keep the biggest twists light, since this is a summary but not everyone wants every beat spoiled flat. What matters is the shape of it. Harper does come to care for Rhen, but the book does not let love be a simple key in a lock. The curse was built on cruelty and pride, so breaking it requires more than a kiss. It requires truth about what Rhen did, what Lilith wants, and what Harper is willing to give without giving herself away. There is a confrontation with Lilith that is scary and messy, not clean magic. There is loss. People Harper cares about get hurt. Choices made in panic have costs that carry into the next books.

The beast transformation hangs over everything. Kemmerer writes Rhen's fear of it well. He has killed before while in that form. He remembers enough to hate himself after. That fear makes him both gentle and controlling with Harper, gentle because he never wants to hurt her, controlling because he wants to keep her away from the worst of him. Harper pushes against the control while trying to respect the fear, and their fights in this stretch felt real to me. Neither of them is fully right. Both are scared.

Without giving away the final page, I can say the curse does break, but not in a way that fixes everything. Emberfall is still threatened. Lilith is still out there. Grey's story is clearly unfinished. Harper's family situation back in DC still matters. The ending gives enough closure to feel satisfying while leaving doors open, which makes sense for book one of a trilogy followed by A Heart So Fierce and Broken and A Vow So Bold and Deadly.

What worked for me and what dragged

The best parts are Harper's voice and the way disability is part of her life without defining her whole character. Her cerebral palsy affects how she walks, how fast she tires, how she fights, how strangers treat her. It does not make her inspirational in a cheap way. It makes her practical. She plans routes. She asks for what she needs. She gets angry when Jake or Rhen try to decide her limits for her. Kemmerer has said she grew up with a friend who has cerebral palsy and wanted to write about how a curse looks different depending on who carries it, and that care shows. Harper never treats herself as cursed. Other people try to put that label on her, and she rejects it.

Rhen works best when he is unsure. The formal prince mask is a little stiff early on, but once Harper cracks it, he becomes sadder and funnier and easier to believe. Grey is my favorite, steady and dry and clearly holding back pain. Lilith is a strong villain because she enjoys herself. She is not a puzzle to solve. She is a person with power who likes using it, which makes her scarier than a distant spell.

Fair criticism first. The middle really does repeat. Training, dinner, village visit, training, dinner, Lilith scare, repeat. Around the halfway mark I started skimming some sparring scenes. A few castle routines show up cycle after cycle without adding much new. Readers who want constant plot may get restless. I also wanted more time in DC with Jake and Harper's mother, since those early pages are strong and then fade for a long stretch. When family does come back into focus, it hits, but the gap is long.

The other thing to know is who this is for. This is young adult fantasy romance with clean to light romantic content, lots of talk about consent and pressure, and violence but not grim detail on every page. If you want dark political fantasy with high body counts, this is not that. If you like slow burn romance, fairy tale retellings, sword practice, castle life, and a heroine who speaks plainly, this will suit you. Fans of Sarah J. Maas, Marissa Meyer, and Stephanie Garber are the usual comparison, and that feels right, though Kemmerer is less lush than Maas and more grounded than Garber.

I closed the book thinking about Harper more than the curse. She goes from a girl trying to keep her family afloat in DC to someone who chooses to stand in front of other people, limp and all, and say what she wants. Rhen gives her a kingdom to care about, but she gives him something rarer, a person who sees his worst season and still expects better from him. That exchange is what stayed with me after the last page, more than any single battle or kiss.