A Curse So Dark and Lonely

Overview

Brigid Kemmerer opens her Cursed Prince series with a familiar fairy tale reshaped for modern readers. Prince Rhen of Emberfall has lived the same autumn dozens of times, cursed by an enchantress to relive his eighteenth year until someone falls in love with him. What began as a strange inconvenience has curdled into horror: each cycle ends with Rhen transforming into a destructive beast, and the wreckage he leaves behind grows harder to hide or forgive.

Harper, meanwhile, has no patience for magic or monsters. She's spent her life compensating for a mother's terminal illness, an absent father, and a brother who treats her as fragile because of her cerebral palsy. When she intervenes in what she thinks is a street crime in DC, she's pulled instead into Rhen's collapsing kingdom, with no clear way home and no reason to trust anyone she meets there.

The novel alternates between Harper's blunt skepticism and Rhen's exhausted hope, tracking how two people shaped by very different kinds of hardship start to see each other clearly. As the deadline for breaking the curse closes in, the book widens its focus from a single romance to the fate of an entire kingdom under threat.

A Fairy Tale Recut for Harder Questions

Kemmerer's retelling leans less on enchanted castles than on the psychology of repetition and consequence. Rhen isn't simply waiting to be loved; he's a young ruler forced to confront, cycle after cycle, the damage his transformations cause to the people and place he's responsible for. That structure lets the book ask what accountability looks like for someone who can't fully control what he becomes, a question that gives the romance plot more weight than a typical fantasy crush story.

Harper's disability is written as one fact among many that make up her character rather than a plot device to be solved or overcome, which distinguishes the book within a genre that has historically sidelined disabled protagonists from fantasy adventure. Paired with the novel's commercial success and comparisons to writers like Marissa Meyer, the book has helped anchor a wave of fairy-tale retellings aimed at readers who want familiar story bones with more contemporary stakes attached to them.

Why the Book Has Drawn Objections

Depictions of physical violence sit at the center of most complaints, since Rhen's beast episodes involve real destruction and danger to people around him, and the book doesn't soften the aftermath into something tidy. Some readers have also flagged the story's undercurrent of controlling, fear-driven dynamics between its leads, arguing that a romance built around a partner's capacity for harm sends a troubling message regardless of the fairy-tale framing. Additional concerns raised in review requests point to scattered profanity and brief sexual content as inappropriate for younger shelves. Within the catalog tracked here, the title has drawn 3 state-level and 3 district-level challenges, generally brought by parents or committees weighing whether its darker material suits middle-grade and early-high-school collections rather than older teen readers.