There's some beautiful language in this, and humor that actually made me chuckle several times. And lots of plant and animal participation, which pleased me as a gardener and animalholic. On the other hand, the "beast" part of the story took way too long to get started, and the end was a bit dissatisfying both for the long explanation required (which really jolted the pacing at a moment of high tension) and also for the somewhat-inexplicable burst of wild-and-craziness (I won't spoil the details) at the climax.

Certain aspects of the plot are extremely similar to T. Kingfisher's recent version of the story, Bryony and Roses, which makes me want to go read older versions and learn more about the roots of the tale. But this one is more poetic and fantastical and less humorous than Kingfisher's, and I think Kingfisher may have handled the climax better.

For an excellent critical review of some of the problems with the book, read Stephanie's review here.

As for the narration, in audio this is narrated by the wonderful Polly Lee/Bianca Amato/Rebecca de Leeuw. She has become my very favorite romance narrator, and she does an excellent job here. I highly recommend looking her up -- she's extremely talented not only with voices and accents, but with her expressivity and simple listenability.

I just finished reading Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter for, oh I don’t know, at least the fifth or sixth time. (I really ought to come up with a system for keeping track of how many times I read a book.) I come back to this book almost once a year because it’s just so…luscious and lovely. There are parts I get a little impatient with because it is so lush and extravagant in it’s telling, but every time I turn the last page, I sigh a sigh of deepest and most utter satisfaction. Because it is truly a wholly beautiful story. And it is my most favorite version of the Beauty and the Beast story.

I was a teenager when I first discovered Beauty and the Beast, and it was Disney who introduced it to me. Belle is my favorite of Disney princesses—I always felt she was the one most like me—and Beauty and the Beast is my favorite of Disney movies. I loved, and still love the story. (In fact, I just saw the live musical version of it on Friday, which is why I decided to reread Rose Daughter.) I have always loved the story, but as I got older and learned more about love, there was something about it that began to sit not quite straight with me. There was something not quite True about it. And I began to wish for a different ending.

Then, about ten years ago, I discovered Robin McKinley’s books, and that discovery led me to Rose Daughter. And McKinley’s telling is True. Even though it’s kind of messy and leaves the more practical side of me puzzling over the logistics, it’s True. It is the love story that Disney’s version, and all the other versions I’ve read, fall short of being. And it has become the definitive version of the story for me. I can only hope that I write something as lovely and as true some day.

Is it true that nowadays we sometimes become numb (by forgetting – usually not deliberately) of our bodily sensations… and all kinds of feeling? I’m not sure why this happens, but I know that reading reminds us of the world around us with words that bring our thoughts back to what being alive feels like. Then, consciousness is gained and seemingly ordinary sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds that envelop us every day and every night become prominent once more. Robin McKinley’s “Rose Daughter”, published in 1997, nineteen years after her debut novel was written, titled “Beauty”, does all the things mentioned. In McKinley’s second retelling of the classic story “Beauty & the Beast” or, “La Belle Et La Bete”, I’ve learned to cherish those moments of profound presence that McKinley’s story offered me.

In McKinley’s Beast’s palace there are trowels, gossamers, hydras, phoenixes, briars, numen, torcheres, virgins bowers, pietra duras, beech trees, sphinxes, and balustrades galore. They constantly change shape and color, and we learn along with Beauty that it is difficult to ensorcell a sorcerer, and just as difficult to tame a supercilious woman in a painting. This magical world-building in McKinley’s “Rose Daughter” includes a few places, which at the start is the family’s beautiful townhome in the city. Then the story moves to the small and delightful country town and cottage, and at the end, universes in their entire grand splendor are found within the Beast’s enchanted abode. The novel’s focus on the relationship between the Beauty & the Beast, of course, is the best part. What other princess fairy tale possesses the same kind of attention to falling in love as this one?

While the basic “Beauty & the Beast” premise is the same, McKinley’s retelling is wrapped up uniquely and exquisitely in the mystery and fervor essential to fairy tales. We are introduced to a baby Beauty by learning that she has nightmares every night while trying to sleep in her crib. In these nightmares, she walks down a huge, shadowy corridor that smells strongly of roses. But as she walks, she knows there is a monster waiting for her at the end of the corridor, and she is terribly frightened. She shouts out, is drenched in sweat… but before meeting this monster she wakes up. She continues having these nightmares throughout her life, but doesn’t tell anyone until much later.

Like McKinley’s first retelling of “Beauty & the Beast”, this story will charm you into oblivion. Beauty’s two talented and loving sisters, one named Jeweltongue for wisdom and the other Lionheart for fierceness of character, and their serious and thoughtful Father, all lived together in the nicest townhome in the city. Their father was the richest merchant in the town. Beauty, the quiet and practical one, loved gardens with all her heart. And although the three daughters were motherless, as their mother had died early on, the entire family treasured life as much as possible through this loss, throwing parties and enjoying the luxuries of their earned wealth. But another unfortunate day came, and the merchant lost all of his riches and owed a great debt to many people, and was forced to sell all his belongings and property. In those times sorcerers and greenwitches were abound, but the merchant swore off using any kind of magic after his wife passed. He wouldn’t use even a little bit of it, and the family, empty-handed, wondered what their next move might be. Now the three girls never complained and only worried silently, and took on the burden of work with the grace of angels. Soon, Beauty found a letter stating that the family was left one small estate out in the country next to a town called Longchance. The estate’s name was Rose Cottage. This place would change their lives forever. Once in Longchance, Jeweltongue became a splendid dressmaker, Lionheart took care of the small town’s horses, and Beauty changed a backyard full of gnarly thorns, bushes, and shrubs into a flowering garden, with superfluous roses… when it was said by the locals that only a greenwitch could make roses grow there. All three eventually became adept at farm work. What’s more is that they realized how happy they were, and came to the conclusion that they never knew real happiness before.

McKinley wonderfully draws out personalities and relationships within the first few chapters, and it is all a pleasure to read. When she gets to the part where the three girls’ father has to leave town for an embargo that landed for him, and the on way home from an unsuccessful trip gets lost in the woods only to find an enchanted palace, the story throbs and shimmers with new meaning. The Beast is wise and terrifying, gentle but monstrous, kind and brutal. Beauty’s father takes a rose from him as a gift for Beauty, as she requested, but little does anyone know that roses are the Beast’s most beloved object of all. After the Beast howls and speaks in anger, their Father, with his last ounce of courage, looks up and sees that the Beast is slouched down,with his head lying in turmoil in his gruesome paws. What a strange thing to feel pity for such an unnerving sight! When Beauty is made to travel to the Beast’s palace in exchange for the life of her father, she calms herself by asking, “…can a Beast who loves roses so much be so very terrible?” And no he cannot, for the dread that comes from the initial meeting transforms into an understanding of what it takes to conquer the soul’s deepest fears.

“Rose Daughter” is the perfect elaboration on a well-known tale that will resonate to all kinds of readers, young and old, for a long, long time. In it you will find the complex story behind why the Beast became what he is, whether or not an old curse of three sisters is just a nursery rhyme or real, and whether cats have powers greater than any magician.

I think Robin McKinley is a very good writer but this was not a great story.

Title: Rose Daughter
Author: Robin McKinley
Publisher: Greenwillow Books, 1997
Genre: YA Fantasy, YA Retellings

This review can be found on my Blog, TeacherofYA’s Tumblr, or my Goodreads page

My Review

So I didn’t get the one with this pretty cover at the library. My copy had a plain blue cover with a tiny graphic, which means I had the original 1997 release. But I’m sorry, I couldn’t bear to put that ugly thing on this page. Like Drew @ TheTattooedBookGeek, I should do a cover challenge (Friday Face-off) and show you all the different covers this book went through so that we can all decide which one is the best. (I love those posts). This book, since it’s been around for 20 years, has been through its share of covers.

But enough about that. I finished this book awhile ago…but it has taken me forever to want to write this review. I can’t even do this one in my traditional format…so I decided to combine it with another book that was a bit shorter and try something new.

So we will see how this goes!

Are any of you familiar with McKinley’s book, Beauty? It’s more of a middle grade book…it was one of my faves as a kid. Apparently this book was a retelling of McKinley’s book. She didn’t like the way she left off…so she wanted to retell it from another angle, McKinley is known for her retellings, and I had only read Beauty. But I loved Beauty (pictured next). So I gave this one a try, thinking it would be a grown-up version of the original.

Ugh. I was right I guess…it was a “grown-up” version…if you consider a stiff, flowery-prosed, confusing plot a “grown-up” version. This book was trying to be more than it was. It was a YA book trying to play dress up in mama’s heels. It was….just ugh.

The story is this: traditional Beauty and the Beast meets magic (duh), a huge obsession with roses, and a beast that has no personality whatsoever. Same set-up: Rose is the daughter but she has two sisters named (I’m not kidding you) Jeweltongue and Lionheart. WTF? Seriously? And her name is Rose? Why not Rosehips McGee at this point? Makes more sense with the other two bizarre names. And Rose loves…you guessed it! Growing roses! Wow! Father goes broke, they move, yada yada yada he ends up in the Beast’s palace…etc etc he’s forced to send Roe in his place. We know the story by now.

What was irritating was that it was IDENTICAL to B&TB in every way except for long descriptive passages that made me fall asleep and magic that is never explained. No animals but there’s food. The house provides everything you need. Rose misses her sisters so much but dreams about them every night, though it never occurs to her that she’s actually seeing real events. It’s just inconceivable hogwash. I hate to say it, but this is the worst retelling of them all.

I want to tell you the most frustrating thing of the book…but it’s a spoiler. Now, this book is 20 years old, and though I hate to give away spoilers, (if you really want yo read this, just skip the rest of this paragraph bc I can’t keep this to myself: it’s just too weird), I have to confess the ending that makes no sense whatsoever.
Spoiler alert: the Beast STAYS a beast even though he has a choice to become a man!! How is that supposed to work out?? I hated that decision the most of all.

Ok, you can look now.

Example of the writing that drove me absolutely insane:

“She looked up at once, pierced to the heart by the sorrow in his voice and knowing, from the question and the sorrow together, that he had no notion of what had just happened to her, nor why. From that she pitied him so greatly that she cupped her hands again to hold a little of the salamander’s heat, not for serenity but for the warmth of friendship. But as she felt the heat again running through her, she knew at once it bore a different quality. It had been a welcome invader the first time, only moments before; but already it had become a constituent of her blood, intrinsic to the marrow of her bones, and she heard again the salamander’s last words to her: Trust me. At that moment she knew that this Beast would not have sent such misery as her father’s illness to harry or to punish, knew too that the Beast would keep his promise to her, and to herself she made another promise to him, but of that promise she did not yet herself know. Trust me sang in her blood, and she could look in the Beast’s face and see only that he looked at her hopefully.”

I tried. I really did. So no more here for me…I’m just going to cut to the chase. I give Rose Daughter ★★☆☆☆. And I really didn’t want to rate anything that low, but I just…I just can’t.

Rose Daughter holds a dubious distinction that was previously held by Proust's Swann's Way. I fell asleep the most times in my life while reading this book. Every time I picked it up, I literally fell asleep, which explains why it took me 2 months to read when other books take me mere days or hours. Everything I detest about bad writing was found here:

1. Meandering purple prose that serves no function to advance a plot. Okay, I love a bit of purple prose from time to time. I've read 95% of all of Lucy Maud Montgomery's works, and she was the queen of purple prose. The difference between Montgomery and Robin McKinley is that her descriptions don't last for pages and pages. She sets the scene and then returns to the life of Anne Shirley or Emily Starr.

2. A plodding, paper-thin plot that could have been told in half the number of words if not for the pretentious writing. It's supposed to be a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Instead it felt like a tutorial on how to plant roses. I really don't care how gardeners graft rose bushes and need to use sumptuous fertilizer (aka poop) to make their flowers grow. How about we spend some time developing the relationship between Beauty and the Beast? What a novel idea!

3. One-dimensional characters that do not evolve or grow organically. Beauty is sweet and kind and beautiful at the beginning of the book and at the end. Her sisters with the laughable monikers Jeweltongue and Lionheart are horrid individuals to begin with but then manage to do a 180 for no apparent reason. Beast is vapid and dull, and he also seems to have no redeemable qualities except he's an amazing artist. Well, in that case, Beauty, marry the guy. You'll have nothing to talk about, but at least he can make pretty pictures.

4. Plot-holes that are summed up with the inadequate explanation of "because it's magic!" Why were there no birds in the enchanted castle's grounds? We got a poor explanation for why there were no living things at all before Beauty's arrival, but then why did all the other animals return except the birds? What's the significance? Why did time move differently between the castle and Rose Cottage? Why did the first rose take months to wither, but the second withered within hours? Because...Magic!

5. WTF ending The Beast remains a beast at the end, and Beauty is still going to marry him. Everyone, including her father who was hitherto afraid of magic, is totally cool with Beauty committing bestiality. I get that it's supposed to show that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, but it's like McKinley didn't consider any of the ramifications of a young woman and a gigantic hairy beast getting it on. Just...no

Somehow, by sheer willpower, I managed to finish this book, but I would not recommend it to anybody. Please read McKinley's other retelling of Beauty and the Beast. That is a gorgeous piece of prose with a well-developed romance and some wonderful twists to the original tale. Leave this one on the shelf, or better yet, use it as compost for your own rose garden.

Beauty lives in Rose Cottage with her sisters Lionheart and Jeweltongue and is learning to be happy. Then her father steals a rose from an enchanted castle and must send his youngest daughter to the Beast's lair where she sets about healing his damaged rosebushes and also his heart?

1. I was not prepared for that ending and am honestly kind of side-eyeing McKinley hard for allowing it to end like that??? I was not prepared to have to accept that kind of fetish in my fairy tale retelling. YIKE.

I MEAN THE BEAST STAYS A BEAST? WHAT KIND OF MONSTER-FUCKING NONSENSE ARE WE ENCOURAGING HERE?

Also: the ending is just RIFE with exposition and not even well-done exposition, just: TEXT. WALLS OF TEXT. MILES OF TEXT. Paragraph on paragraph of context and climax resolution like it's meant to matter when clearly it doesn't because the build-up is a lot of half-started foreshadowing and sloppy plot points that don't actually resolve into anything. NEXT.

2. The world-building was rather slight, and left me wanting.

3. I just didn't believe in the romance, which made the ending EVEN HARDER TO DEAL WITH.

4. Overall: it was a fine Beauty-and-the-Beast telling, but it was also kind of dull and lifeless and not one I plan to return to. SORRY NOT SORRY.

5. SORRY BUT THAT ENDING THO.

Ovo je inspirisalo T. Kingfisher da napiše Bryony and Roses, i to se vidi. Što ne znači da je Bryony and Roses plagijat (koji mi se dopao više nego Rose Daughter), samo da se vide sličnosti.

Od ove autorke sam ranije čitala Sunshine, to mi je i dalje jedna od omiljenih knjiga, i očekivala sam da mi se i ovo dopadne.

I ovde je stvarno mnogo, mnogo toga dobrog.

Ali su tu i likovi koji prećutkuju jedni drugima neke bitne stvari, što mi generalno uzev u knjigama (i ne samo u knjigama) ide na nerve. Pa se onda još i raspričaju onda kad bi hitna akcija bila znatno bolji odgovor na situaciju. Nekome to neće smetati, meni jeste.

Na sve to, čitanje ove knjige je ličilo na ono kad se vučete kroz neki san. Nekad je košmarno, nekad nije, ali je protok vremena čudan, i prostor je čudan i stalno promenljiv, i objašnjenja (kad ih dobijete) su zbrkana i zbunjujuća i dobrim delom sam ih već zaboravila, i emocije su one nekad intenzivne i ne baš racionalne emocije iz snova... I to nije mana knjige, to je vrlo promišljen i dosledno sproveden postupak, i autorki svaka čast što je to uspela da izvede kroz ceo roman, samo što ja u takvom postupku baš i ne uživam.

No, svakako vredi čitanja.

I'm definitely rounding up, but four stars aren't enough. And "amazing" is a good word for a book that revisits the same fairy tale twenty years after the author did so the first time, and makes something so different of it, deeper and richer and stranger and even more satisfying. The author's note at the end explains the genesis of this second treatment, and the explanation is convincing, but I suspect additional maturity as a person and author may also have contributed.

My only quibble is that there are a small number of stories/speeches/monologues that feel inserted and go on a bit too long.

As much as I love Robin McKinley, this isn't my favorite of her books. I love the strong relationship between Beauty and her sisters, but their father is an afterthought who only seems to be there for the requisite rose stealing scene. I love all the animal scenes (I'm not an animal person IRL, but McKinley and Garth Nix write *the best* animals and make me wish I was). I felt like the Beast was sidelined to the point where it was unclear *why* Beauty loved him (pity, sure, but not love). The climatic scene at the end was just confusing. 3.5 stars

Ugh, Beauty is the better of the two re-tellings of Beauty and the Beast by McKinley, hands down. In this one, Beauty is just too dumb and one dimensional for words. All she wants to do is garden. Booooring. I say dumb, because before she and her family left the city, she went to all of her friends to learn how to do important stuff like make butter and cheese and can goods, important survival stuff when going from a city to the middle of a rural village. A magical salamander that is her friend offers to give her the gift of being able to remember everything her friends are telling her. She declines. What?!? She needs that information, it could be the difference between life and death for her and her family, yet she says "no thanks"? And I'm sorry, but her father drove all magic users out of town, but their next door neighbor is a retired sorcerer with a salamander as a familiar? How did that get past the editors? O, wait, never mind. There clearly weren't editors for this book.
Don't get me wrong, I love Beauty, but McKinley should have stopped while she was ahead. The ending for this version blows too. *spoiler* The Beast doesn't change. Isn't that kinda the whole point to the story? Dude, it's literally Beastiality if she and he consummate their relationship. That is the height of nasty.
Skip this one, read Beauty instead.

The book was good till the last few chapters which took a weird turn.