A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing
Age Group: Young Adult
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: Magic Users, Royalty Characters, Chronic Illness, Mental Health, Mobility Aids, Trauma, Action, Adventure, Fairytales, Portal Fantasy, Curses, Various Magic
Series: Cursebreakers #1
My Rating:
Published on: 29th January 2019
Pages: 496
Disability Representation: Cerebral Palsy, Mental Health, PTSD
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Bookshop.org US / Bookshop.org UK / Waterstones / BookBeat Audio
Add to Goodreads

In a lush, contemporary fantasy retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Brigid Kemmerer gives readers another compulsively readable romance perfect for fans of Marissa Meyer.

Fall in love, break the curse.

It once seemed so easy to Prince Rhen, the heir to Emberfall. Cursed by a powerful enchantress to repeat the autumn of his eighteenth year over and over, he knew he could be saved if a girl fell for him. But that was before he learned that at the end of each autumn, he would turn into a vicious beast hell-bent on destruction. That was before he destroyed his castle, his family, and every last shred of hope.

Nothing has ever been easy for Harper. With her father long gone, her mother dying, and her brother barely holding their family together while constantly underestimating her because of her cerebral palsy, she learned to be tough enough to survive. But when she tries to save someone else on the streets of Washington, DC, she's instead somehow sucked into Rhen's cursed world.

Break the curse, save the kingdom.

A prince? A monster? A curse? Harper doesn't know where she is or what to believe. But as she spends time with Rhen in this enchanted land, she begins to understand what's at stake. And as Rhen realizes Harper is not just another girl to charm, his hope comes flooding back. But powerful forces are standing against Emberfall . . . and it will take more than a broken curse to save Harper, Rhen, and his people from utter ruin.

This book was provided for free by  and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

Please note
As an Amazon Associate and member of other affiliate programmes I earn a small commission from items purchased using links featured in this post at no extra cost to you. Click here to learn more. Every purchase you make through Just Geeking By helps keep this blog running.

A Curse So Dark and Lonely was recommended to me as a book with disability representation for GeekDis when I asked for recommendations. I’m glad it was available on Scribd because it was a great book and had great disability representation, too!

A Curse So Dark and Lonely is a stunning dark fairytale novel with a no-nonsense heroine, a captivating and complicated prince and a host of interesting background characters. Of course, I fell in love with the book very quickly! Kemmerer’s lush storytelling paints a modern reimagining of a fairytale many of us know well, Beauty and the Beast, and adds some much-needed realism into the story.

Our protagonist Harper is disabled, born with Cerebral Palsy, and several characters have mental health conditions as a result of the curse they have been forced to live with. Due to the sorceress’s cruelty and other events that have happened, this includes PTSD, and Kemmerer doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of living under a magical curse, unlike most authors. There’s only so much hope you can have for it to be broken, after all.

By whisking a disabled young woman from the present day into a fantasy world that has zero mod-cons, Kemmerer provides an opportunity to look at disability from a completely different perspective. In Emberfall, “disabilities” don’t exist, and it is instantly assumed by Emberfall citizens that Harper must have been injured in battle; why else would she walk with a limp? More than once, Harper has to explain that she’s not injured, and it’s interesting to see how the characters react to her disability. She still has to deal with people’s judgments, but this time it isn’t that she’s not capable; it’s that she is more capable because they assume she got her “injury” doing something heroic.

Kemmerer takes care not to erase Harper’s identity as a disabled person, however, and I wanted to make that very clear. Placing a disabled character in a world where disability doesn’t exist is tricky. On the one hand, it can be used to interrogate the issue of ableism and prejudice, using it to compare attitudes, which is what Kemmerer does; however, it can just as easily go very wrong and erase disability.

So how does Kemmerer ensure that doesn’t happen? It’s not just one thing. There are many little things throughout A Curse So Dark and Lonely. I’d like to emphasise that I don’t have Cerebral Palsy, so I can’t comment on how accurate the representation is, and I’m curious to know what someone with the condition thinks of this book **.

As someone with multiple chronic conditions, I noticed every time that there was a reference to how Harper felt physically, to her recognising how her body was moving and how aware she was of her place in both worlds. In particular, the amount of attention paid to her breathing and how it changed, dependent on what she was doing or how she was feeling (a lot of writers tend to miss that emotions affect respiratory conditions), was very noticeable to me. 

In the Acknowledgements at the back of the book, Kemmerer credits the details of Harper’s Cerebral Palsy to a sensitivity reader, and I believe her when she says it made all the difference. It gives it the authenticity that it needs, and I wish that more nondisabled authors incorporated sensitivity readers into their editing process for this very reason.

** Many thanks to Tonia, who passed a review of A Curse So Dark and Lonely onto me, by Dear CP, who has Cerebral Palsy. You can read their chapter-by-chapter review of the book here. Straight away, the most notable thing was that the author incorrectly misspelt the condition (and as a result, so did I in this review, which I’ve now corrected). That is something that the sensitivity reader, in my opinion, should have picked up. Of course, the author and the publisher do not have to take all the recommendations of the sensitivity reader under advisement, it is, after all, only “advice”.

About Brigid Kemmerer

Brigid Kemmerer is the New York Times bestselling author of dark and alluring romantic fantasy like Warrior Princess Assassin, A Curse So Dark and Lonely, and Defy the Night, and compelling contemporary romance like Letters to the Lost. Her books have sold over one million copies and been translated into more than 20 languages, finding readers all over the world. A full time writer, Brigid lives in the Baltimore area with her family.

Website | Facebook | Goodreads | Instagram | Twitter | Tiktok

Thanks for reading my book review for A Curse So Dark and Lonely!

Don’t forget to check out the rest of my reviews if you’re looking for some more book recommendations 🙂 You can also now sign up for my newsletter to get an email each month with a list of my new reviews!

Support Just Geeking By

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you did please consider sharing it on social media using the nifty buttons at the end of this post <3

If you enjoyed this content please consider helping to support my blog. You can do this in multiple ways (click here to find out how!) or by donating via Ko-Fi to help me reach my current goal.