Title: The Beauty Thief
Series Title: Twelve Realms
Author: Rachael Ritchey
Date Added: February 5, 2016
Date Started: July 13, 2017
Date DNF: July 19, 2017
Reading Duration: 6 days
Percentage Read: 25%
Genre: Fantasy, Christian, Young Adult (YA)

Pages: 346
Publication Date: March 20, 2015
Publisher: RR Publishing
Media: eBook/Kindle

In the Twelve Realms there lives a man who covets life. He lurks in the shadows, intent upon stealing that which sustains his perpetual existence: true beauty. Princess Caityn’s loveliness reaches from what the eye sees to the very marrow of her soul. The thief’s covetous heart desires the life her beauty possesses and will stop at nothing to take it all.

I really wanted to like this.  It had characters in royal/leadership positions who were actually decent people.  The main character Princess Caityn and her brother Prince Adair were raised with the philosophy that though they were royal, their duty was to serve their country, and though the people of the kingdom might be their subjects, they would never be subjected to corrupt rule.  Caityn often visits and comforts widows in addition to reading or teaching lessons at the orphanage, and her boisterous brother Adair was once punished for playing a prank on his sister by having to work “scullery in the kitchen for a week.”  This was an excellent way to show that the king and queen not only raised their children to show compassion towards the needy, but they didn’t hold with the elitist idea that they couldn’t perform “common work.”  Nor is this attitude unique to the royals of one kingdom.  When Caityn’s fiance Prince Theiander arrives for their nuptials, his mother chastises his sister the Princess Eliya for treating a groom unkindly, especially considering he was doing not only his job, but the job of another man who’d recently fallen ill.

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