"Beauty" by Robin McKinley Book Review

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"A strange imprisonment....

"Beauty has never liked her nickname. She is thin and awkward; it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage.

"When her father comes home with the tale of an enchanted castle in the forest and the terrible promise he had to make to the Beast who lives there, Beauty knows she must go to the castle, a prisoner of her own free will. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, 'Cannot a Beast be tamed?'

"Robin McKinley's beloved telling illuminates the unusual love story of a most unlikely couple: 'Beauty and the Beast.' "

This whole review is full of spoilers. I'm not blocking it out. Read at your own peril.

This is one of the many novels retelling the famous fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" - in fact, this is only one of two that this author has written - I heard the other one is mostly about roses. I enjoyed this book, it was a very fast-paced read. It kept pretty close to the original story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont.

But there were a few things that bothered me. For one, when Beauty wants to leave in her father's stead, her family protests at first and then they just let her go. So in short: "NO! NO! NO! NO! Fine." I mean, they are sad, but I expected something a bit more dramatic and realistic to happen. I totally expected her to runaway in the middle of the night and then get rescued from starving and freezing to death by the castle's sudden appearance. At least in the original story it is said that her family is a bunch of vain jerks that don't care that she may be going to her death.

I can rely upon my imagination to add to the details that the author supplies. But this may in fact be the laziest description of a main character that I have ever read. Frankly, I'm confused as to what the Beast was supposed to look like in this version. There are a lot of mentions about gryphons and then there's a mention of a lion's mane, but that's it. Did he have hooves? Was his face a weird bird-like beak thing? In that case, did he have wings? If I had been Beauty and he had had wings, I would have married him in a heartbeat.... And then been promptly disappointed when he turned into a plain non-magical albeit handsome human being.

And the ending made little sense while being anti-climactic. There should have been some drama when she finally said "I love you" to the hideous creature that she was so scared of when she first saw him. Instead it was said and then a few sentences later, it's wedding time! There wasn't any painful transformation, no fireworks, or fairy lights. Nothing! At least they had a chaste kiss, I suppose.

And then, if the magic was gone, how in the hell did her family know to go to the castle then? There's no magical way to send the message, and they would have had a hard time believing that anyway. There was no mention of the Beast sending a human liveried servant to them to let them know of the happy tidings. How did they know to go and what persuaded them to undertake the journey?

And then the townsfolk.... I can imagine how that conversation went down: "Hey, Beauty is getting married to a king we forgot existed for at least two centuries." "Wasn't she with her aunt in the city?" "Oh, about that, it's a terrible lie and a long story. Anywho, let's just walk right into that enchanted forest that we have been making up terrifying stories about that have TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE!!!!" On a scale of one to never ever happening, it's definitely the latter.

Magician? Really? Wouldn't 'witch' have been a more appropriate name for that guy considering the time period of this story? And that was the dumbest reason to curse an entire family. I mean, I've heard of people murdering each other for stupid reasons, but I would never turn my enemy into a literal killing machine. That sounds like a plan that should've backfired instantly. But it was nice of the guy to let the Beast know that he just had to make someone fall in love with him to break the spell, because no one has ever fallen in love with an ugly King/rich guy before. The witch, as I'm calling him, could've just waited until the incestuous relationships in the royal family began to manifest into freakish deformities in the future generations instead of performing a curse that didn't even work right away.

By the way, when was this supposed to be happening? That library really threw me off. I can understand if they were in an alternate reality that they would have future books in it, like the world's most Tardis-like castle ever. But when the magic is gone at the end of the story, did all of those future books just disappear?

And then the Beast forgot his own name, which okay, if no one is saying your name to you for two hundred years you might forget it. But you'd think, being surrounded by all of those books, he would've gotten the idea to write down the most emo of all biographies ever. Even though no one would have read it, being inside a castle that everyone has forgotten existed that is also inside a horrifying enchanted forest that no one enters willingly, it probably wouldn't have an audience. But it would have kept him busy and he might have remembered his name, provided he started with a title page. " 'My Ugly Face by King -', eh, I'll fill that in later."

And then, Beauty. It's not really her fault she didn't know she was pretty. She started off an awkward teenager that has lost everything and happens to have sisters who could double as models if they felt like it. There aren't any mirrors in the castle the whole few months she is there. And when she visits home no one thinks to give the whiny bitch a mirror just to shut her up? In fact the only person who does make her look in a mirror is the Beast who has avoided mirrors out of habit for obvious reasons.

I swear I liked the book before I started this review, I guess I started thinking about it. But I would certainly hand this to a teenager or a tween since this would be right up their alley. Ms. McKinley was very faithful to the original story, perhaps too faithful. But it was an enjoyable read.

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3 out of 5 stars, for the Stockholm Syndrome.