I have finally finished this novel and MY!! What a stunning novel it was!
It’s been resting on my shelf since 2017, and it’s been calling to me for years to be read and completed.
It was such a whimsical and cozy piece of writing. I will always think about this novel whenever I look at my mothers garden. I loved Beauty and her family! I loved all the little animals and the scenery around her and rose cottage!! And I adore the beast!!!!!
If you love gorgeous, descriptive, atmospheric romances that are retellings, this is up your alley! You really won’t regret it.

I enjoyed this, overall, and was surprised by the ending: the Beast remains a Beast! "Because I love my Beast, and I would miss him very much if he went away from me and left me with some handsome stranger." "Then everything is exactly as it should be," said the Beast."

Dear author,
I loved "Beauty" when I read it many months ago; I thought nothing could ever take its place in my heart. Now, after reading "Rose Daughter", I can't decide which one is dearer to me. Robin McKinley, can you decide for me? Which one I like better? Which one I have to love less? Clearly, I have to choose; everything comes with a choice. And how, and why, do your stories have the power to hold the earth in me and move it so fiercely?
-A reader in awe of your magical and beautiful books.
P.S: Your "Sunshine" slowly tortured me, the first time I read it, and the second time I read it, and the third, and more times to come, I believe.. How much will your other books torture me, I wonder.....

Nice beginning, slooooow middle, weird ending. Honestly not sure why this book was written.

Counting it for "A novel". VT reading challenge 2018

Maybe it was because I listened to this as an audiobook, but I found this novel so soothing--so soothing that it threatened to lull me to sleep sometimes. The gentle nature of the heroine, combined with her equanimity in the face of strange magic may have had something to do with it. It might have been how low-conflict the entire story was. It felt like a bedtime story told by someone who didn't want to scare me and give me bad dreams.

The story is more than familiar, of course. I'm forty-eight. I lost track of the versions of Beauty and the Beast I've read and seen and heard many many years ago.

I enjoyed that the sisters in this one were good people who loved their sister (no ugly rivalries and petty jealousies here). I appreciated that Beauty's quiet, unassuming nature didn't mean she was put-upon, ignored, or taken for granted by her family. I liked the way magic worked at the Beast's house. Beauty's adventures with bringing life back to the palace were fun. I especially enjoyed the hedgehogs and bats.

When we got to the explanation of how exactly the enchantment came about, it got very convoluted and I found myself tuning out. Wait, what? There's a third sorcerer? Who loved who? Huh? While McKinley is probably trying to explore the complex nature of truth, all these gray areas made for muddy reading.

It was a dreamy and quiet sort of book, which made a nice respite from some of the sex and violence I usually read, but it was maybe overall too dreamy and quiet to quite hold me.

Sometimes I wish we all knew a lot less about the evolution of Robin McKinley's sexual preferences over the years. This book is literally just a gothier and more bestiality-tinged Beauty, but with the added squickiness of her choosing to have him stay a (200-year-old) beast at the end because the alternative is having a hot husband but people will talk shit about them. That is the sum total of her reasons for marrying a giant monster instead of a hot dude. And her sisters all urge her to marry him anyway. I cannot even. (My favorite part is when she says in the afterword that this book came to her after marrying Peter Dickinson.)

On my Robin McKinley graph of shame and weirdness, this sits somewhere between Pegasus and Chalice on the "creep factor of love interest" axis, and sits squarely at a level with the faux-goth "edginess" of Spindle's End on the "how hard is this book trying" axis.

Warnings! If you like this book and are easily offended, this won’t be for you. Mean review ahead!

Puh, glad that that’s over and done with. What a drag. Although to be fair to the author, I think the book simply wasn’t for me (apart from the ending which is a right mess. And the weak-ass romance. I can fault her for that. I mean, who doesn’t love a good 7-days insta-love romance? Who…. doesn’t…).

I don’t give a fig about gardening, flowers, gardens or in-depth descriptions of nature and there’s only so much I can take of reading about every pattern of every wallpaper the protagonist comes across throughout the narrative before I start skimming through it. And boy did I skim through whole passages of the book (which I normally reserve for fanfictions only) and it still took me forever to finish. I've just got the overall impression that the author was more occupied with describing every single detail of the setting without giving much thought to an interesting plot. For me Rose Daugher is style over substance all the way through.

Also, I’m someone who drives on character interaction and for the most parts of the narrative there simply is none. Beauty and the Beast? They barely talk and there is absolutely zero chemistry between them from the get-go. Overall the characters are so bland, Beauty in particular, I couldn’t relate to any of them. And yeah, that ending, omg…. I truly had to force myself to get through the last 30 pages and not DNF it on the homestretch.

So yeah, if you’re like me, I wouldn’t recommend it.

P.S. And some of my favourite quotes because yes, I am that petty:

“You are in the presence of form without substance, sound without meaning, clatter without articulation.” You mean… like… the whole of Rose Daughter? *cackles*

“Well then, if he were an ordinary man . . . and my darling sister burst into tears immediately after telling me he had asked her to marry him, I would advise her that it is perfectly obvious that she should say yes.” Erm… as having a sister myself… no?!

P.P.S. AND CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT THIS STUPID CURSE IS SUPPOSED TO TELL US EXCEPT FOR THREE SISTERS LIVING TOGETHER IN A COTTAGE??? WHY ARE BEAUTY&CO. SO PANICKY ABOUT THAT, HUH??? ARE THEY AFRAID THEY WILL BE ACCUSED OF CRAZY INCEST ORGIES OR WHAT???

The story was more interesting than Beauty, but Beauty feels like a safe, warm hug

It was not a good sign that I could not wait for this book to be over.

McKinley wrote Rose Daughter twenty years after her masterpiece, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast. The first book was near perfection. The second one (also a retelling of Beauty and the Beast) left me puzzled on almost every page. In the “author’s note” McKinley states that the book basically wrote itself, galloping out of her control most of the time. That describes it perfectly. Was she too famous for any editor to try to rein the story in and polish off its rough edges?

There many sentences that required multiple readings to enable comprehension:

"Her feet were still half numb from the thrum of the corridor, and inclined to curl involuntarily away from what they stood on, without recognizing that the irritation was gone." (WHAT ON EARTH???)

There were many endless sentences such as, "Each spring and autumn since they had lived in Rose Cottage, one or two or three of the traders from the convoy that had brought them here stopped in on their journey past, to see how the old man who had once been the wealthiest merchant in the richest city in the country and his three beautiful daughters – with a good deal of joshing about the metamorphosis of the eldest into a son, always accompanied by the promise not to give her away – did in their exile." Another sentence was 69 words long.

In addition to the lack of fluidity in the writing, was lack of flow to the story. The many imaginative scenes felt like fragments rather than a cohesive whole. Mostly, I kept asking myself, “What the heck is going on here??” The hero and heroine are never fleshed out sufficiently for the reader to understand why they fall in love. Magic rather than goodness overcomes evil in the end. In the final pages Beauty makes a decision that turns the whole tale on its head. Disappointing on so many levels.

2.5 stars
The first half wasn't that bad....
Actually, mid-way through this book, I thought it was pretty good, and I was sure that this one was going to end up wrangling 4 or 5 stars out of me.
Oh well, I've been wrong before.



Several things happened that lowered my enjoyment level down to nothing, and they all happened toward the end.
First, it's not like the pace in Rose Daughter was very fast to begin with, but I was dealing with it (admirably, I thought). You know how sometimes the beginning of a book drags and you can't get into it? Or in the middle of a story it sloooooows down to a crawl, and you just want to scream Get on with it already!?
Well, in Rose Daughter it was the ending that...um, wouldn't end.
I can't recall another book I've read where the pacing was like that. The ending was booooring. For example, there's the part when she goes back to find Beast and tell him she loves him, but she gets lost in the magical house (or whatever it is).
It took forever to get her from point A to point B.
And we hear about all of it. Every. Convoluted. Minute.
What she tastes, what she smells, what she hears, what she feels, what she thinks, how many times she weeps, and (last but not least) what the people in the paintings are wearing.
Pages and pages of it.
Are there actual readers out there who care about that stuff?!
There must be, otherwise McKinley wouldn't have sold such a boatload of books. On the upside, if you like to skim when you read, then this is the book for you! Never fear, Dear Reader, you won't miss out on some important detail, because none of it matters!



Ok, even with such a slow pace, I probably wouldn't have rated it so low, but the ending creeped me out! Ugh! Awful!
See, the Beast doesn't turn back into a human at the end. WTF?! Now I know there are some people out there going Oh, but looks aren't everything! I think it's sweet that Beauty loved him just the way he was!. No. It's skeevy and gross. They are not even the same species, people!
Ewwwwwww!
When I was seven years old and thought that being married meant that my BFF was a boy, it wouldn't have freaked me out to think about Beauty getting married to an actual Beast.
Why?
'Cause I didn't know about sex yet, and I didn't know married people had it, that's why.
So, as Beauty was stroking his giant hairy-ass paw at the end, and telling him how happy their marriage was going to be...urp.
I feel dirty...and not in a good way.

Very nice and vivid. Slower and quieter than the author’s other take on the Beauty and the Beast tale, but probably with many more protagonists of the non-speaking variety. I loved the descriptions and Beauty’s unassuming, no-nonsense strength.

It was a curious thing, she thought sadly, how one is no longer satisfied with what one was or had if one has discovered something better. She could not now happily live without roses, although she had never seen a rose before three years ago.

I read this in 2016 and now can remember nothing whatsoever about it. I'm sure it was well done (McKinley is a good author) but nothing stands out.