Sarah Cross Books

Sarah Cross made her name in the early 2010s wave of young adult fairy tale retellings, when publishers were racing to feed the appetite stirred up by shows like Once Upon a Time and Grimm. Her breakthrough was Kill Me Softly, published by Egmont USA in 2012, which introduced Beau Rivage: a modern seaside city where fairy tale curses are real, inherited and play out over and over across generations. Teenagers there grow up knowing which story they belong to. The book follows Mirabelle, a girl fated to prick her finger and fall into an enchanted sleep, who runs away from her guardians back to her birth city hoping to learn the truth about her parents' deaths and finds a crowd of cursed teenagers instead.

What defines Cross's writing is her treatment of fate. Because Beau Rivage replays its fairy tales endlessly, her characters live inside narratives that were written before they were born, and the tension in her books comes from watching them fight, embrace or bargain their way around those stories. Some characters cling to their curses because a guaranteed role feels safer than an open future, and that psychology is where the books get their bite. Her tone is edgy rather than whimsical. The curses are cruel, the princes are not automatically good, and happy endings are earned or subverted, never owed. It is exactly the sensibility that today's dark fairytale romantasy runs on, built a full decade before the current boom.

Kill Me Softly was followed in 2015 by Tear You Apart, a companion novel that hands the spotlight to Viv, Beau Rivage's Snow White figure, whose stepmother wants her heart and whose on-again-off-again boyfriend Henley is cursed to be her Huntsman. When an underworld prince offers to save her from her fate if she becomes his queen, the escape turns out to be its own kind of trap. The book braids Snow White together with Rumpelstiltskin and a heavy Hades and Persephone undercurrent, with a dash of Romeo and Juliet for good measure, and for plenty of readers it is the stronger of the two, more romantic and more brutal at the same time.

Heat-wise, Cross writes young adult, so both Beau Rivage books sit at 0 to 1 on our spice ratings. The romance is charged but closed-door, all tension, dread and doomed kisses between characters who know exactly how their stories are supposed to end. What the books lack in spice they make up for in menace; the possibility that Viv's story ends with a knife lands harder than most adult retellings manage with triple the page count.

We include Cross on the site as genre ancestry, and we mean that as a compliment. If you came up through BookTok-era romantasy, the cursed love interests, fated narratives and fairy-tale-with-teeth aesthetic you love were being assembled in books like these while half of TikTok was still in middle school. Beau Rivage is a direct ancestor of the current crop of retellings, and readers who live for the forbidden love angle in modern fae romance will recognize the DNA immediately. She also works as a palate cleanser: shorter, sharper and far less committed to multi-book cliffhangers than most modern series.

Start with Kill Me Softly for the full introduction to Beau Rivage and its rules, or jump straight to Tear You Apart if you want the darker, more romance-forward story, since it stands on its own comfortably and fills you in on the city as it goes. Both books are easy weekend reads compared to the doorstoppers dominating the genre now, which makes them ideal between-series picks. And if you are not sure whether vintage YA retellings are your lane at all, take our book quiz and let your actual tastes decide.