Two Beauties

[mamculuna]

Retold tales have made for many a good book lately. I thought when I found these two that they'd both be the same story, but it turns out that Tepper's is Sleeping Beauty, so I wasn't expecting as much from it, since the B&B story seems so much more archetypal. Well, wrong. Both books are excellent—no surprise to those of you who've read their others. Both left me in those post-book dazes where you want to start over, or find someone else who'd just read it to, or really, go live in it. But they're very different—McKinley started as a young-adult, Newberry Prize winner, eventually evolving into the author of Sunshine. Her Beauty is probably just that, but it's so very well done that the nine-year-old reader inside me was completely satisfied. She stays with the traditional elements of the story, just placing it in a world so real you can imagine going there. Tepper comes out of science fiction/fantasy mixed with some social concerns (women and environment) and her Beauty goes far beyond the basic tale—to other tales, future worlds, and finally to a sort of speculation/mediation on the end of the world and the meaning of beauty. I especially enjoyed the aging of her Beauty—not just for that reason, but the sixty-one-year-old reader in me was happy, too.

Beauty Sheri Tepper
Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, Robin McKinley

Comments

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Mmm. Have you read _Rose Daughter_ yet? Both these books have a special place for me as does the the fairy tale:

Beauty and the Beast has been my favourite fairy-tale since I was about six; I still have the book I first read it in. When I wrote Beauty, I sat down, as I thought, to write a short story, and found I had more to say than I expected. I'd been going to that place in my head where my favourite fairy-tale lived for nearly twenty years; a lot had happened there in that time. But I found, to my dismay, that writing the story exorcised it. I couldn't go there anymore. And for the first several years after the book was published, when readers told me it had become a place in their heads where they liked to spend time, I was jealous. Because it was no longer available to me.

Fron the story of _Rose Daughter_ on Robin McKinley's website: http://www.robinmckinley.com/Essays/RoseDaughter.html

[wombatina.livejournal.com]

i'll have to look these up. Have you seen Jean Cocteau's Sleeping Beauty? It is the best most beautiful version. I had the chance to see it with a libretto written and performed by Philip Glass a few years ago. remarkable!