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The Beautiful and the Cursed: The Dispossessed    by Page Morgan Amazon.com order for
Beautiful and the Cursed
by Page Morgan
Order:  USA  Can
Delacorte, 2013 (2013)
Hardcover, CD, e-Book
* * *   Reviewed by Lyn Seippel

In late November 1899, seventeen-year-old Ingrid Waverly arrives in Paris with her mother and younger sister. Her mother's dream is to open an art gallery there. The night is cold and snowy. The ruined abbey which awaits them is dark and dank with grimy cracked stained-glass windows. Being inside the abbey isn't much better than the cold and snow outside. The roof is lined with ugly gargoyles. Ingrid can see why gargoyles are called grotesques by the French.

Ingrid's twin brother Grayson was sent ahead to find a place for the gallery and somewhere for the four of them to live. Ingrid is appalled at his choice, but her mother disagrees. She thinks that after renovations the abbey will make a wonderful art gallery. In the meantime, they'll live in the rectory which isn't in much better shape than the abbey.

Grayson isn't there to meet his family and they're told he hasn't been seen in four days. Ingrid's twin sense tells her he is in trouble. Her first order of business is to find her brother.

Luc Rousseau is a gargoyle, one of the dispossessed, whose job is to protect those who live on the abbey grounds. He's been in hibernation for hundreds of years. Now he appears as a human and is hired by Grayson as one of the rectory servants. Ingrid and her sister refuse to stay inside the abbey grounds and danger seems to stalk them, making protecting them both complicated and difficult.

The Beautiful and the Cursed is the first in a new trilogy about The Dispossessed by a talented new author.

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