4.5 starsHands down my favorite McKinley. Young, untainted McKinley before she got all artsy fartsy and tried to down play and deny her appeal as a creator of likeable, pleasant, homey - hearth side heroines. There was a time she seemed to go all symbolic and archetypal and shit with her characters - Outlaws of Sherwood, Deerskin - McKinley was like all "I don't need these character to be like, all, you know personable and relateable - that's just for pussies - these characters are my stand-ins for great, huge, mythic, eternal truths - they don't need personalities - they just have to be - so suck on that all you readers who liked Beauty - and you know what - just to really fuck with your head - I'm going to re-write this book and call it Rose Daughter - take that - beaatches!"Ok, I don't really imagine that Robin McKinley talks like that - that was just my inner teenage girl creeping out. And McKinley did seem to come back around to more earthly, accessible heroines later on - Spindles End, Sunshine - yeah!I don't even know if I can speak coherently about this book - I've read and re-read this book so many times - I love and adore it all out of proportion to what it really is. This is my go to comfort book. The world gets scary and comes undone and I can crawl into this world - where smart but plain girls can go all ugly duckling/ beautiful swan and a strong, loving family creates a strong heroine, where the relationships between the women are loving and not adversarial. I want to say something all poetic about how the love and warmth of the hearth at Beauty's house is the light and warmth that she takes with her to the Beast's cold castle -- but yech - I think that's pretty apparent.Happiness, sadness, read 2 Robin McKinley's and call me in the morning - I was reading this book through most of the 12 plus hours of induced labor (before the inevitable C-section) of my first child. I read this during the staggering post partum depression of my second.What kind of books do we invite into our lives at these pivotal moments? And here I mean pivotal like balancing precariously on the edge of a cliff - not pivotal like at the next successful decision making crossroads I'll be in line for that promotion. Sorry, McKinley - your book has become larger than the sum of it's parts - you at a time of crisis - just suddenly popping up and offering to lend a hand - well that would be awkward and annoying. You and I are strangers - but your book - your worlds - I'll take them any day of the week. So what is it? What about this book is the siren call to my soul? The first time I read this book I was a post adolescent and my older sister and my mother - we all basically devoured this book together - practically at the same time - hastily handing it off from one person to another. So there we were all over the pages of this book - ok not 100% - we were/ are real people - and Beauty and her sister are too adorably good-natured to be true - and me and my family we do fight and misunderstand and judge - but just as much as we weren't there in the pages - we also were there. Women who love and know and accept one another - my family - we are the way less rareified version of these characters - with farts and low blood sugar bad moods. A shared reading experience among mother and daughters - with a book that is all over about the salvation of the home fires - keep 'em burning babe - because you may never be able to go home again but you can always take it with you- and it is always good to be reminded that at the source of your soul there are people there who love you. And aren't you just a lucky mother fucker that you will always have that? Because not everybody does. And in my head and in my heart, I agree - yes, yes - I am a very lucky girl.So thank you Robin McKinley - even though you seem to be embarrassed and disheartened by the success of this - your, apparently, least favorite writing endeavor - because you have created a book that has become an anchor for my soul.
There is something about the Beauty and the Beast story that is attractive to society in general and to the literature, movie making crowd in particular. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch and other books in varying literary quality draw on the motif, subverting, perverting, or simply retelling it (One of my faves is Jane Yolen's version which is a mash up with O Henry's Gift of the Magi). It is no surprise that Robin McKinely was drawn to the tale, twice, and any reader can see the germ of the second novel in this book, her first.McKinley's writing, in particular The Hero and the Crown, was one very important touchstone of my childrhood, as it seems to be for many fantasy reading women of my age. I can't help but wish that teen girls of today would read her the obessive way and in the vast amount of numbers of those that read Twilight or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. McKinley writes better, and she will most likely last longer.This book, McKinley's first and her first retelling of Beauty and the Beast, was totally ripped off by the Walt Disney Company for thier movie. It's actually sad and insulting because not only did Disney rip it off, but they totally shortened the Beauty character (now, before people come and demand my Tigger shirt back, I happen to like the Disney movie, but a spade is a spade. Get over it).McKinley draws heavily on the French version of the story, yet she makes it her own. Beauty likes to read, but unlike Disney's Belle (Beautiful in French), Beauty reads literature, not the romance novels of her day. Belle's love of reading is based on her love for romantic adventure; Beauty's is based on a love reading for itself and for knowledge. She is a scholar. It is difficult to imagine Disney's Belle having the same reaction to the library in this book, that Beauty does (also, we are never given a title of what Belle reads, hmmm). Another change that McKinley makes, and she is one of the few authors who does this, is make Beauty's family a loving family. Beauty not only loves her father, but she loves her sisters. She and her sisters get along. They take to each other, not down to each other. They are not in competition. This isn't a fairy tale of the bad sisters being punished and the good (always the young one) being rewarded; it's about a loving family being rewarded.Because this is early McKinley, there are flaws in the book, flaws that make the reader understand why McKinley basically rewrote the story in Rose Daughter. Beauty, for instance, is almost too perfect. She is the girl who stands out because she is not only more bookish, but more boyish than the other women. This perfection is dealt with in the end sequence. Additionally, Beauty's gaining of Greatheart feels like a wish fullment version of the horse movie of the week. But these are really, almost nit-picking. The most serious flaw is the fact that Beauty's sisters, Grace and Hope, are almost interchangable, though fully likable. McKinley also presents the view that being non-bookish is not any worse than being bookish, which is nice.What I truly love, now, however, is simply that I only realized when I re-read this book as an adult. Beauty and the Beast from its earliest days was always a story about women and marriage, in particular the fear of marriage that must have developed in a society when the marriages were arranged and husband and wife barely knew each other. McKinley keeps this, and adds, understandably, a fear of desire and of changing into an adult. In many of Beauty's reactions to Beast there is the change of pubertry but also that struggle of coming to terms with adult desire, love, and one's own sexuality.
What do You think about Beauty (Folktales, #1) (1993)?
Maree ♫ Light's Shadow ♪ Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite stories, so I'm pretty tough to convince when it comes to reading retellings. I didn't enjoy Beastly at all, so when it came to this one, I wasn't expecting much either. But I was pleasantly surprised!I really enjoyed the language. It was beautiful and fit with the time (I appreciated that it still took place in the past instead of modern day). You could really feel Beauty falling in love with the Beast, and I enjoyed how her family wasn't lost to the background, but were constantly there on the forefront of her mind. And it was a big family at that! I thought having a fully fleshed introduction before even getting to the Beast was smart as well, and made Beauty a real character rather than just the Disney girl most people think of.The only part I didn't like was the ending. I felt like it wrapped up too fast and perfectly, even for a fairy tale. I'm also a big fan of the closing sentence, and I didn't feel like that was it. It's not that I wanted more--I just wanted something better. That's the only reason this book isn't getting five stars.
—Maree
This is a quick read - young adult fiction. There were elements of this story (a re-telling of Beauty and the Beast) that had the potential to be really cool, but the author concentrated on the clothes and hair and food instead of the magic. I'm all for detail, but come on! The main character was labeled "plain" from the beginning and her sisters were beautiful. Of course in the end the plain one becomes pretty and the Beast is also pretty and TA DA all is right with the world. Booo. Also, many many holes in the world the author created. You know they're big if I notice them.
—Nicole
fairy tale retellings are fascinating - i went through a datlow-phase years ago, and i have read many others outside of her collections - it is a comfortable pleasure for me. so, since i am now going on an "introduce myself to the fantasy genre" expedition, this book seemed like the most logical entrée into it all.beauty and the beast was never one of my favorite fairy tales - i don't know why, particularly, but i usually preferred the ones that didn't have a corresponding disney movie which would unavoidably be playing in the back of my head as i was reading them, not to mention the songs - the dreadful songs...but i really liked this adaptation.the best thing about this particular version is that mckinley changes the backstory a little bit in a way that makes it more natural and a much better story overall.most fairy tales operate by isolating the main character. the heroes and heroines are frequently orphans, or abandoned by their parents/stepparents, friendless and forced to make their own way with the occasional animal or supernatural ally. but in this retelling, beauty comes from a loving family. she and her sisters are close, her father loves her deeply, she has a strong sense of community and duty. the cinderella type, who stoically goes on sweeping and polishing while everyone around her abuses her and enslaves her while she just keeps turning the other cheek as though she is in a morphine daze - i cannot get behind that kind of character, because they seem less human and more symbolic; they are empty. in the original b and the b - of course beauty would go to the beast - what's she got to keep her where she is?? some shitty sisters and a weak father? (she does love her father in the original, but the rest of her life is pretty easy to leave behind). but in this version, her decision is made out of love and sacrifice and she is giving up so much, that it makes her sympathetic, but not some doormat like so many others, doing "good" because they have been lobotomized sometime in their past. her decision feels more natural considering her background; the sacrifice is greater than that of someone with nothing to lose. this young woman has learned how to love and how to be nurturing from a support system that includes her family, but also includes her neighbors and everyone she meets along the way, in a natural nice-girl way that is never treacly. and she is no gentle delicate flower, either - this girl is a perfect match for the beast.without that family-oriented background, it is illogical that she would have learned how to be kind, how to be giving, how to care for the beast enough to bring him back to his true form. (there is no way i am putting a spoiler alert on this review, by the way - DO YOU LIVE IN A HOLE???) i think that mckinley made absolutely the right choice by changing the parts she did, and her prose is beautiful and simple and a real treat to read. and don't get me started on that library. this is why we need more booknerd heroines in our fairy tales. so books like this can be written.i think i got muddled somewhere in the middle of all that, but never mind - maybe the brain will make more sense tomorrow...nope!and if anyone can tell me the fairy tale collection my grandmother had when i was little, i would be so grateful.
—karen
