10/8 - [buster from arthur voice] you think someone would just do that? let someone write the same premise twice? almost two decades apart? robin mckinley was the blueprint for cassandra clare, that's wild.

anyway, i haven't read beauty since high school, but i kind of wish i read it along with this for a more accurate memory and comparison. but anyway, i like this better than beauty for three reasons: SISTERS! beauty, jeweltongue, and lionheart love each other so much and they're so distinct and i wanted them all to be happy. i do not remember her sisters at all from beauty, sorry to those girls. also beauty didn't avoid mirrors for no reason here, and then go gasp i'm hot?! what the hell was that about. number two, i liked the greater emphasis on magic with the roses, the various locations of the castle and the town beauty and her fam stayed in.

third, people hate this book compared to beauty because beauty's choice at the end here was an indictment of generational wealth. could have been olde european jeff bezos but chose the monster loving, that's anticapitalism, baby! 'but how will they have children?' fuck them kids, also go read inuyasha or a comic book!

10/4 - i'll say more later, but the monster fucking indoctrination would have been earlier and stronger if i chose to read this instead of beauty back in high school

I wish I could remember Robin McKinley's other retelling of Beauty and the Beast better. I read it when I was younger and I would like to compare the two. I think I didn't like this one as well. I wasn't a huge fan of Beauty. She seemed wishy-washy to me. The magic in the story didn't work as I wanted it to, and the part I enjoyed most was the small snippets of life back with her sisters that was revealed now and then. It was still a good story, but not my favorite. The descriptions of roses were lovely. I have always enjoyed the scent of roses.

I thought this book was going to be a repeat of Beauty. It wasn't, too much, but I think it would have been better if it was more like Beauty. It was Beauty, minus the good stuff, plus a bunch of boring stuff, basically.

The prose is nice, but there's not much depth to the characters. The pacing is meandering at best.
It takes entirely too long to get anywhere.

I loved the 3 sister witches' lore, though; this was the highlight of the book for me.

Why is Beauty's dad also such a Dumb A in all tellings?

Solid 3 Stars. It didn't feel connected well with the 1st book.

Yikes. This was my first Robin McKinley book and I'm not sure I'd like to read another.

Flouncing, rococo prose. Glacial pacing. Silly characters with no credibility. Padded with useless scenes. Inexact worldbuilding that isn't inexact in an exciting, romantic, organic way (like a Le Guin or a Pierce). Lots of scenes that were clearly based on McKinley's own life and hobbies. YOU KNOW. When they take pages upon pages to describe how charming a horse or a dog or a garden is? And you go to their Wikipedia page and it makes mention of how much the author loves her horses, dogs, and gardening? Thanks, I hate it. Put that shit in your blog. Don't inflict it on me in a novel.

I like when fairy tales are recycled, because I think they offer really interesting frameworks to explore deep moral questions and longstanding cultural values. But Rose Daughter has the emotional depth of a Holly Hobbie commemorative plate. Sticky. Drippy. Saccharine. And stupid.

I could tell this was a late-career entry for McKinley, because no editor would've allowed the kinds of run-on sentences I found inside this book. One was over a hundred words long! Ugh. Yeah no.

I read this book as a teenager but retained no memory of it. After reading it again, I know why.

McKinley says in the afterward that she chose to revisit the Beauty and Beast story because she had more to say, especially about roses. Well, that's about all she has to say in this book. Lots about gardening, description of stuff, and cutesy-wootsy little animals. Other than that, nothing goes on in this book whatsoever.

The problem with this book is there's just no conflict. All the possible conflicts are glossed over or resolved before they even have time to get serious.
--The impoverished family has a ridiculously easy time in the most idyllic provincial town in existence.
--The two older sisters are paper thin archetypes of the clever one and the tomboy, and they find suitable husbands who have no personality and pretty much never show up.
--There's some kind of a curse on the family. But I still have no idea what it is. But don't worry. It wasn't a curse anyway! Duhhh
--Beauty is never really mad at the Beast for threatening and kidnapping her. She just figures he wouldn't have hurt her dad anyway and, hey, cool garden!
--The Beast himself was a perfectly nice dude as a human, and got magicked into a beast as an accident. No character flaws here.
--There's some kind of villain figure with the oldest son of an important family, but no one listens to him anyway and Beauty's dad punches him with no repercussions. Problem dealt with. Guess it wasn't so urgent for Beauty to come home anyway.
--In lieu of any conflict at home, Beauty loses her memories, which is the only reason she forgets the Beast's flower until it's almost too late. Whoops.
--Beauty decides to keep the beast at the end and go back to a provincial life instead of marrying a human and having influence. I guess it's not bestiality--except it literally is--but just shows again that life is just so damn perfect.

That brings up Beauty herself as a character and Good God is she annoying. I know she doesn't have anyone to talk to for a lot of the book, but her incessant ramblings to every cat, bat, toad, and spider she comes across get really old. "And I do hope you'll be a good little spider now and not have the bad manners to leave cobwebs in my perfect garden..." It's that self-conscious British flippancy that always sounds really pretentious. Pages of it.

Beauty reminds me of the Butch's ditzy girlfriend Fabienne in Pulp Fiction. Except, if possible, more so. The girl who rambles on about what she's going to eat for breakfast and how cute she'd look with a potbelly but totally forgets to pack her boyfriend's super important family watch.

Beast: "So this rose is very important..."
Beauty: "And I'm going to plant whole forests of roses if only I can get them to be well-behaved enough little darlings, and I'll let the sweet little hedgehogs get all those troublesome slugs..."
Beast: "...Because I'll die when the last petal falls."
Beauty: "Aren't you a cute little kitty! Oh, did you go and have kittens, you clever thing?"
Beast: "Are you even listening?"
Beauty: "Something about a rose. Roses can only be grown by those with magic, and I usually don't care a thing for magic..."

The additions McKinley does make to the story, such as the background about the witch who owned the cottage and some kind of war between sorcerers (not too clear on what actually happened) don't seem to add much to the story. Whenever McKinley gets too much into magic, it always gets messy and a ton of seemingly symbolic things happen but it all seems kind of random.

This is always the problem with McKinley. She starts out with an interesting premise and evocative language, but gets bogged down in description and unnecessary animal sidekicks, only to end with a convoluted "It's magic, bitch" because she can't stand not to hand her characters everything on a silver platter.

Stick to the first book. Sweet and simple. Unfortunately, Rose Daughter is McKinley at her most infuriating.

Unique retelling of the Beauty and Beast fable. Easy read.

3.5- This Beauty and the Beast retelling just can’t top Robin’s other one, “Beauty”. I still enjoyed parts of it, but I feel her other retelling is far superior.
I really enjoyed the sisters in this book, and by comparison the character of Beauty felt very flat and rather boring.

This is one of those delightful and rare books that I ended up enjoying far more than I expected to. I first got this book as a gift from one of my sisters when I was a kid and have been trying and failing to read it ever since. I used to regret that I never read it as a child, but now, I think I’m glad because I don’t think my younger self would’ve been able to fully appreciate the magic of it.

I’m used to fairy tale retelling a to be light, warm, and generally simple - and while McKinley’s work certainly fulfills that, her narrative style is also very dense, which makes it hard to get into at the start. That’s probably what put me off as a kid. But her style is also beautifully poetic, so that once you’re in, it holds you completely. It’s been so long since I’ve read a book that was literally hard to tear myself away from. I would’ve been happy to read it cover to cover with no breaks had time permitted. It was beautiful and magical and yet still so wholly fresh, that even knowing the Beauty and the Beast story as well as I do, I was was still surprised and enthralled all the way.

My one complaint is simple and that is only that McKinley’s style - the poetic nature of it - sometimes keeps the reader at a distance,, so I felt as though I wasn’t able to befriend all the characters as much as I would like to. I read their story, but I wasn’t a part of it. For that reason, I think this story may still be easy for me to forget. No, that’s not right. I won’t forget the story or the magic or the world, but the characters will fade soon so that it’ll be only the bones of the tale that remain in my head.

But, as I said, it’s a small thing, though it may not sound like it. I loved this book quite a lot and I don’t think time will be enough to diminish the simple magic in its pages!

Despite spending 13 or so hours listening to this book, I feel like I learned nothing about Beauty. She spent so much of the book alone, you’d think it’d be a character study but.... what’s her favorite color? Hell, what does she look like?? I don’t recall her hair or eye color ever being given. She likes to garden, and she likes animals... that’s it that’s all we know! What kind of food does she like? She’s not a person just a fairy tale concept of a person. There were no stakes. It was all just one long vague tale about gardening and rooms that changed their appearance.

This book was painful. I really thought I was gonna get a book with character development, depth, and different than the previous book.

Oh boy. Did I get something different. At times it was confusing but that ending, that ending was the most confusing of all. I sort of mad-rushed/skimmed through the other half of the book because the character development became boring, plodding, empty words just to fill pages.

But that ending. I don't think my eyes can unsee what went on there.

Twenty years after Beauty, McKinley retells "Beauty and the Beast" once again. I liked this version better. The writing is beautiful and the story drew me in right away.

Beauty has few memories of her mother, who died when Beauty was very young. When her father's business fails, Beauty's family loses everything. One day, Beauty finds a will that leaves a home called Rose Cottage to her family. They leave the city, not knowing what they will find in their new home.

Beauty and her sisters, Jeweltongue and Lionheart, discover that they are happier in their small country cottage than they were in their fancy city house. Until the day that their father returns home from a visit to the city and tells them of his encounter with a mysterious and frightening Beast.

To save her father, Beauty goes to live in the Beast's castle. There, she becomes friends with the Beast and works to bring his once-beautiful rose garden back to life.

Though the ending still leaves a few questions unanswered, I thought the story behind the magical events was better told in this version than in Beauty.

Long sentences and some difficult vocabulary will make this version more enjoyable for those with higher-level reading abilities.