Take a photo of a barcode or cover
districtreads 's review for:
Spindle's End
by Robin McKinley
Robin McKinley is a goddess, first of all. Her books can do no wrong for me – I just adore her fairy tale retellings. Beauty is one of my favorite books.
First of all, the writing is simply beautiful: “People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.” JUST. GAH. And the entire book is written in this narrative vein. Which I loved – it kept with the fairy tale feel by dispensing with the dialogue. Not just that, but McKinley managed to retell Sleeping Beauty in a way that was actually different enough to be unique, but familiar enough to clearly be Sleeping Beauty. So A+, McKinley, A+.
Second, as other reviewers have said, it was totally twee. It was kind of refreshingly different. And from a feminist angle, Peony seems as if she’d be the perfect princess, meanwhile the real princess, Rosie, is a mess. She hates anything feminine, and frankly, she is a badass who has "beast speech." The only thing that creeped me out was Rosie’s love interest, who I felt was a bit too old…but hey, it’s a fairy tale. Shit happens.
Cross-posted to http://off-the-book.org
http://www.off-the-book.org/2014/05/face-in-book-update-mini-review-edition.html
First of all, the writing is simply beautiful: “People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.” JUST. GAH. And the entire book is written in this narrative vein. Which I loved – it kept with the fairy tale feel by dispensing with the dialogue. Not just that, but McKinley managed to retell Sleeping Beauty in a way that was actually different enough to be unique, but familiar enough to clearly be Sleeping Beauty. So A+, McKinley, A+.
Second, as other reviewers have said, it was totally twee. It was kind of refreshingly different. And from a feminist angle, Peony seems as if she’d be the perfect princess, meanwhile the real princess, Rosie, is a mess. She hates anything feminine, and frankly, she is a badass who has "beast speech." The only thing that creeped me out was Rosie’s love interest, who I felt was a bit too old…but hey, it’s a fairy tale. Shit happens.
Cross-posted to http://off-the-book.org
http://www.off-the-book.org/2014/05/face-in-book-update-mini-review-edition.html