a good story but one that has been told so many times that it was to predictable.

gosh I just love beauty and the beast SO MUCH

I don't know why I had the urge to reread Beauty, but I'm glad I did. I needed the gentle enchantment of the story and the quiet strength of the various loves that it's really about: Beauty's love for her family, Beauty's love for the Beast, the Beast's love for her, her sisters' love for their partners, Beauty's love of her horse...

It's not laugh-out-loud humorous most of the time, but there's a gentle humour to all of it, and it really made me smile.

The only things that grate on me are the fact that Beauty is supposed to be plain at the beginning and then she becomes beautiful, even though she was perfectly fine as she was, and even though she fell in love with the Beast as the Beast, she ended up marrying a man who she didn't know, and who didn't even know himself if you consider the fact that he doesn't remember his name.

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.

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.

n  -Actual Rating 3.5 Stars-n

I fell in love with this Beauty and the Beast retelling. Beauty was quirky, and the tone was humorous. I enjoyed how the author wove the details of the fairytale, which aren’t as well known because of the Disney movie, into this retelling, with the Beast proposing marriage every evening, the invisible servants, and the enchanted palace that was always summer.

This was a good retelling. While it started off a bit slow and the writing isn't too easy to follow, by the middle of the book you get used to it.
I quite liked this retelling of B&B, where Beauty isnt exactly a beauty and her sisters are nice and more beautiful than Beauty and are not ugly inside or out.
I loved Beauty's character development, you see the plain her and see how much she grows confident in herself.
Beast is also an interesting characters, very tamed and nice and thoughtful. It was wonderful to see how their relationship formed and bloomed throughout the book.

The title says it all. This book is beautiful on every level: Writing, characters, story, themes. I thought it was an awesome portrait of quiet, gentle love and the joy to be found in simple things.

Dudes and ladies alike: Just read it.

I'm hesitant to call Beauty a re-telling of "Beauty and the Beast" as it's not so much a re-telling as it is a telling. McKinley's rendition of this classic fairy tale not only fails to veer off from it's typical path, but it also - sadly - fails to capture much of the magic of the original tale as well. I half expected my Kindle to burst into song or for "A Tale as Old as Time" to suddenly play out of thin air, but I fear I enjoyed even Disney's telling of this tale more than McKinley's.

From the surface, there is nothing egregiously different about this story from the classic "Beauty and the Beast" tale. All the usual elements are present - Beauty willingly goes to live in the Beast's castle, the Beast slowly wins her heart, and the spell of bestiality is broken. With such a simple formula, it seems impossible to really fail; and McKinley hasn't. I cannot deny that her writing is lush and gorgeous, the magical enchantment strangely enticing, the interactions between Beauty and her Beast unerringly lovely. And yet, I feel as if the fault of this novel lies in its perfection.

Most notably, to me at least, is the utter humanity that seeps through the Beast. After a two hundred year imprisonment, this is - oddly enough - not a man to lose his temper or give in to any of his bestial traits. In fact, he is always the perfect gentleman, which essentially makes him a bore. Either than a small temper tantrum that is mentioned - not even witnessed - Beauty is given no reason to dislike the Beast. Not only is he kind and caring, but he provides Beauty with every comfort, including companionship. Of course Beauty falls in love with him - what's not to love? With this fairy tale, appearance is the only obstacle to cross, which takes away from the depth of this classic story. Beauty never has to tame the Beast, as she so bravely announces in the first part of this novel, so their love story is disgustingly sweet and a complete bore as well.

Beauty herself is also another paragon of perfection. When confronted with sending her father to his death or willingly venturing into the Beast's lair - one where, rumor has it, he eats humans - she quickly volunteers to go and swiftly begins to enjoy her time spent in the enchanted castle. Although she is described as being studious, she is disappointingly dull and never curious at all, which works well for the story, but not so much for her characterization. Furthermore, while Beauty is forced to defend her Beast against her family's opinions, they all come together in the last few pages for a typical happily-ever-after without the surprise or wonder of seeing Beauty's Beast transformed into a man.

Unfortunately, the more Robin McKinley I read, the more I am convinced that the rest of the world is seeing something I am not. I think McKinley is an extremely talented storyteller, but as an author, she manages to nearly always fall short of my expectations when it comes to characterization and development. Is Rose Daughter a sad repeat of Beauty? I suppose I'll find out, soon enough.

4.5 stars

Hands 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.

2.5 stars

I think that part of the reason that I didn't like Beauty was not so much due to Robin McKinley's retelling as a general aversion to the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale now that I'm old enough to notice that it's a little creepy to fall in love with not only a man who looks like a beast, but a man who is effectively your jailor and stalker (ahem, Stockholm Syndrome). This guy also gives you an ultimatum to choose between him and your family, which is lame. I also don't like the fact that this fairy tale story sends the message that love will transform, in this case, literally, an unworthy guy into good husband material. It reminds me of a news article about a recent study about how women were more likely to rationalize traditionally physically attractive, "bad boy" types as good husbands and fathers when ovulating than any other time.

That caveat out of the way, one of the other things that I think strongly affects readers' opinion of Beauty is the previous exposure to Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast which was actually released after the first printing of McKinley's Beauty. While reading McKinley's Beauty, I was struck by the similarities in her telling and the Disney version. The novel gives a more complex depiction of Beauty's emotions, but the storyline is very much like the Disney version, and even more strikingly similar if one takes into account the dark impressions implied by the art and music in the Disney version. In short, this was likely a major contributing factor in me not being "wowed" by this retelling, which is a bit unfair, considering the chronology.

McKinley's writing is sometimes beautiful and whimsical, and sometimes boring, but definitely impressive when considering that this was a first novel by the woman who would eventually write the award-winning The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword. I think that the contemporary reader, especially young reader used to Simon Pulse fiction, would find Beauty quite slow and boring. There isn't much action, and there is plenty of time spent on imagery. One of the things that makes the story beautiful is the same thing that makes it a slow read; ironically, it is too realistic, at least as a love story. My hunch is that the young adult girls, the audience at whom this work is presumably aimed, typically crave a more melodramatic story when reaching for this book, love at first sight, not the gradual building of a relationship from time spent in seemingly mundane diversions like walks, chats and reading.

One of the other things that I liked in Beauty that I wish were addressed better was Beauty's feeling that she no longer "fit" in the "normal" world with her family. I think that it's a universal theme that applies to everyone who has ever left home and returned to find it, and/or themselves, "different" as Beauty's father describes it. To me, it also hints at what many people feel when they are forced to straddle multiple "worlds" of any kind whether cultural or generational. This may be reading too much into things, or it merely may have stood out to me since a similar theme presents itself in The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, but I wonder if this reflects a bit of what McKinley herself may have felt, as her biographical information always says, "in a navy family, traveling a great deal in the U.S. and throughout the world."