I curse this book with a thousand crotch louse.

It's not I didn't like this book. At least, I like the beginning for awhile. But this book's plot was enough to drive me into a rant.

Getting out of the way the fact that the characterisation is great and the setting is stunning and all that shit, let's get into possibly McKinley's only, and truly great weakness, which is plotting and pacing.

The book reads at the speed of an unhurried snail. It starts a full 2.5ish years before Beauty even meets the Beast and shows no sincere interest in moving things along for the sake of actually telling the story. Beauty spends a stunningly little amount of time with the Beast and when we actually meet him, most of that time is glossed over in narrative telling rather than showing.

ARE YOU TELLING ME I JUST SAT THROUGH 2.5 YEARS OF THIS GIRL'S LIFE ONLY TO HAVE FIVE MINUTES WITH THE ACTUAL GREAT ROMANCE THIS FAIRYTALE IS FAMOUS FOR?!



Then, right, the whole thing is wrapped up in about 20 pages. It was infuriating. I don't feel like Beauty's back story and life before the Beast helped us understand her motivations and character arc any great deal. I felt like it was cumbersome for the sake of being cumbersome and wordy and artistic.

I'm so mad about this, that I'm practically hopping. I'm hopping mad, I say!

Jag vill ha mer

3,5*** a nice retelling

One of my friends has been telling me to read Robin McKinley's Beauty and the Beast retelling for a while now. Little did I know, Robin McKinley actually has TWO Beauty and the Beast retellings (the other one is Rose Daughter) and I read the wrong one. Oops. Nevertheless, Beauty is available for free right now with Prime Reading. It was a fun read and I don't regret picking it up as my first time reading McKinley's work.

Although this book is technically a romance, you'd be disappointed if you read it thinking it would be the kind of book that focuses primarily on the romance with a beastly love interest, like Cruel Beauty, for example. Instead, Beauty is a rather close retelling of the original story. While there are a few noticeable changes, such as the fact that McKinley's Beauty has only three sisters and no brothers, and isn't the most beautiful girl in the land, I felt like these weren't enough to make the story truly unique. It was almost too much of a retelling.

However, I adored McKinley's writing style. It was nice enough on its own to keep me reading. I loved Beauty's character, especially her relationship with her brother-in-law and her horse. The character development, writing, and the fact that I never wanted to stop reading made me rate the book four stars, even if the unoriginality of it kept me from giving five stars.

I really enjoyed this retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I loved how well written it was and the author spent so much time on world building. The castle and everything about it is detailed so beautifully. My one issue (which isn't much of an issue) is that there is no new twist. It is a lovely, updated version of the Disney story that we all know and love. I wish the author had used some more creativity and changed things up a bit. That being said, I still loved reading an updated version of the story that I loved so much growing up.

I'm sure part of my gleeful urge to give this five-star rating stems from the fact that "Beauty and the Beast" has always been my favourite fairy tale. I love seeing it redone in modern settings, redone in post-modern settings, and even retold in a time period akin to that in which it was first penned and recorded for posterity.

This novel brings us the story in the first person POV, past tense, but with a current approach to language. I checked the credits and discovered it was first published in 1978 and was surprised at how pertinent all of it still seemed – most fantasy writers working today would probably kill to have produced something as simple, innocent, and ultimately pure as this novel.

It doesn't take the Beauty and the Beast idea and work it into anything unfeasible, and in fact, it sticks very close to the original French version of the tale (Perrault) and the later adaptations. There is nothing strictly unfamiliar here, but instead it's the joy of feeling firsthand the experiences of this character thrust into many uncomfortable situations. McKinley conveys all this with great clarity, and her descriptions are intense and honest and fruitful: you build places and scenes in your mind easily without being bogged down by any excess prose or purely affluent details. You KNOW this story, but even as you read it, you are still given to feel awkwardness, suspense, and joy.

I'll probably read this novel again soon. It was short and sweet and as close to perfect as these things come. If anyone holds "predictability" against it, please see the cover, whereupon it clearly states this is "A retelling of the Story of BEAUTY & THE BEAST." After that, there are no surprises, other than the constant pleasant delight of the author's handling of the subject matter, exploration and detail that the initial idea never develops (being that it's a folk tale, that's no problem, and that's why we like to read and write these things again and again!); in any case, those who are fans of the story itself will love it, probably unconditionally.

Critically – not much to say. A few misprinted typographical things in the edition I have, and knowing now that it was probably written and published at least thirty years ago, you can derive what you want to from that... author's age, life experience, whatever... none of that really factors. The story simply feels genuine, and I find nothing to contest in it. It is, after all, a fairy tale – unlikely beauty found among the thorns. Let's just go with it.

I can't believe I've taken this long to review this book. Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite fairy tales. I really love this story in any format but this teen retelling is legit refreshing.

I'm thinking Robin McKinley is not for me. I've also tried Sunshine, which was recommended to me many times, and could not see the magic.

An absolutely outstanding rendition of Beauty and the Beast. I have read Robin McKinley before, but it's been years, and I had forgotten how well she could write.

The charm of this novel isn't in its creativity with or spin on the fairy tale, but in the way that Robin McKinley tells such a classic story in such a straightforward way, and yet still manages to make it delightful and fresh. In so many longer novelizations of short tales, the authors get caught up in tedious detail to extend the length of the book. McKinley's details do nothing but add to the environment and the story. She expounds in areas that make you realize you were always curious about them: What WAS it like for Beauty to try to make her way back to Beast when she had stayed too long? And what was it like to be such an intellectual woman trapped in a castle full of enchantment?

This was one of those delightful books you start reading more slowly toward the end, simply because you don't want to close its pages.

I think I'll blame my partner's Disney song playlist for making me want to (re)read a bunch of Beauty and the Beast retellings. The obvious place to start (for me, anyway) is with Robin McKinley's two attempts at telling the story, Beauty and Rose Daughter. Beauty is perhaps the less delicate of the two, being suited to a younger audience in terms of complexity, language, etc, but it still makes a good story. You come to care for the little family, and learn to care for the Beast; the mysteries of the Beast's castle are genuinely interesting, though how confining someone to a castle which contains a library full of all the books ever written and yet to be written is a punishment, I'm not entirely certain.

(You can see why I empathise with this version of Beauty, who loves her books and her studies, who reads and rereads Malory's Le Morte Darthur.)

As usual, then, I found this a charming read, and I liked the little references to domesticity that are nearly inevitable with McKinley -- the sisters' rough hands as they learn their new work, their learning curve. And as usual, the thing I disliked most was that Beauty had to be made to match her name, in some magical transformation that made little sense -- the goodness of her is in her inner beauty, and why on earth she needs to have dancing amber eyes, I couldn't say. I liked that Beauty started out plain. I would rather she come to some happy acceptance of that than get a wish to be beautiful -- that doesn't solve anything.

If I'm remembering the key difference between this and Rose Daughter rightly, too, it's a little awful that the Beast vanishes and changes so much too, leaving Beauty faced with a man she doesn't know, who doesn't even know his own name. He's the same person, but then, you can't really say he is when everything's so different and suddenly the Beast she loved is a handsome prince, with very little explanation. It would, perhaps, be better if Beauty instantly recognised him instead of feeling so confused -- at least then there would be a sense of continuity, of the importance of knowing what someone is like rather than what they look like.

I am not that big of a fan of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I definitely prefer the way that McKinley retells the story. I love the sibling relationship, I love how we don't know a lot about the Beast or the why or how of things. This just feels more of a fairy tale to me. There is no real antagonist and there is no real, graspable reality.

Fun and clean. For some reason I expected it to be gritty. It was not! I’ll read more McKinley. I’m especially curious how her other Beauty and the Beast retelling compares. I completely thought she got some of her ideas from the Disney movie until reading that this was published years before the movie. Perhaps it was the other way around.