Overall, Beauty is an engaging character and narrator. Will she ever see them again? Will Beauty and Beast fall in love? RELATED | The Princess and the Hound Book Review – A Fairy Tale Twist As she and Beast become closer, Beauty learns something that she needs to tell her family, who she misses dreadfully. In the tradition of the original story, every night Beast still asks Beauty to marry him. When Beauty goes to the castle, she finds that, as the time goes by, the Beast is actually not as awful as she thought and they become friends. In this version, both Beauty and her sister Grace offer to go. The group is warned to stay out of the nearby forest, where a beast is said to live.Īs in most “Beauty and the Beast” stories, the father finds himself lost in the forest and steals a rose for his youngest daughter. Left with nothing, the family moves to the country to start over. However, one day a storm at sea wipes out the family fortune and Robbie is among the missing. They are pretty wealthy, with Grace becoming engaged to Robbie, a young captain who sails for their father. RELATED | Vintage Film Review: The Swan Princessīeauty and her sisters, Grace and Hope, are the daughters of a merchant in a large city. She is telling us a story about her life, and her personality shines through. With the addition of Beauty’s very practical mindset and her narration, the story takes another turn. Really, the story is about two people thrown together in strange, unexpected circumstances, and how they adapt to it.
It’s also an interesting take on the tale because there are no villains. While Beauty usually has siblings, in this story, the two sisters are fleshed out characters with names and personalities. RELATED | 13 Enchanting BATB Adaptationsīeauty is a twist on the traditional tale. She is always beautiful inside and outside, while the Beast character softens as the story goes on. Beauty is not just physical beauty, but the character of a person. The story is a timeless tale about looking beyond what we see. It’s a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast, a story that is always being retold and imagined, and it’s easy to see why. Published in 1978, Beauty is Robin McKinley’s first novel. This exception is Beauty: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Her novels tend to be told in the third-person, but there is one exception. All of her books are magical tales, told using rich language with compelling characters. McKinley writes fairy tales and fantasy stories, and she’s won several awards for her writing. For me, one of those authors is Robin McKinley. There are some authors who, whenever I see their name on a book, I have to pick it up. Beauty-A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast Review