Part of the reason for that is that pretty much the entire process of her living with the beast in the castle is the last of three sections of a book that was only about 170 pages long in my version. In fact, there’s less time with them together happily, a larger lack of information on her part about what’s going on, and it feels like she literally went from “I guess he’s okay, but this whole life imprisonment thing is super uncool” to “I love him so much I must go to him!” on basically no basis whatsoever. Basically none of that has changed in this retelling. She decides eventually that she’s no longer afraid of him and in fact is in love with him, all is forgiven and they live happily ever after. A young woman is basically imprisoned against her will by a big hulking beast man with brooding depression issues that express themselves in fits of rage, who refuses to talk in any detail about why he’s insisted on this whole process. So I hopefully don’t have to go into the reasons why the story of Beauty and the Beast is problematic at its core in any great detail. Robin McKinley’s beloved telling illuminates the unusual love story of a most unlikely couple, Beauty and the Beast. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, “Cannot a Beast be tamed?” 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. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage. She is thin and awkward it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones.

A lot of this can be chalked up to adherence to the overall themes of the source material, and more to this being the debut work of an author who goes on to improve dramatically, but overall I sort of have to give this a resounding ‘ehhhhh’.īeauty has never liked her nickname.

Less Gaston, a tiny bit more agency for Belle, and not-horrible female relations improve, while less cleverness, not as much evidence for the Stockholm syndrome to set in, and no awesome animated furniture or musical numbers detract from the telling of a problematic story in an only marginally less problematic way. Beauty was the debut novel of now far-more-prolific American author Robin McKinley, and is a re-telling of the classic story of Stockholm Syndrome and toxic masculinity Beauty and the Beast.

Beauty book robin mckinley