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angelakay 's review for:
This book is interesting because it's written by the same woman, [a:Robin McKinley|5339|Robin McKinley|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1314406026p2/5339.jpg], who wrote [b:Beauty|41424|Beauty (Folktales #1)|Robin McKinley|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1294192311s/41424.jpg|2321285] (the first retelling of this story that I red a few weeks back) twenty years prior. In the afterword, McKinley explains that Beauty & the Beast has always been hear favorite fairy tale, & she wrote [b:Beauty|41424|Beauty (Folktales #1)|Robin McKinley|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1294192311s/41424.jpg|2321285] "almost by accident," as more of a writing exercise that she never expected to be able to sell to anyone precisely because it was so straightforward & followed the traditional tale so closely. Feeling strongly that authors shouldn't recycle plots, she said for years she'd never write another "Beauty & The Beast," but it turns out that between 26 and 46 a lot of life happens, and with 20 years of additional maturity & experience under her belt, McKinley realized that maybe she hadn't said everything she had to say about this particular story.
There are definitely similarities between the two. Many of the traditional elements of the fairy tale are intact--wealthy, widowed merchant of three daughters faces financial ruin & moves the family to the country, is unexpectedly called back to deal with a lingering business matter, gets lost in a winter storm while riding back, & is put up & fed overnight at a seemingly empty yet enchanted estate. Upon taking a rose from the estate to give to his youngest daughter, he is accosted by the eponymous Beast who issues the familiar ultimatum, "Your daughter or your life."
This time, though, the story is significantly richer and more nuanced, both in terms of the characters and their emotional depth as well as the back story surrounding just how the Beast got himself into this situation & what it will take to get him out. The magic is spooky, disorienting, and a bit malicious, and in fact that combined with the somewhat schizophrenic storytelling give the whole thing a rather dream-like, disorienting feel that makes parts of it difficult to follow (though I actually thought this worked & added to the ambience).
It only gets three stars from me, though, because a) the first 2/3 to 3/4 were soooooo slow & it felt like there were long stretches where nothing much happened or where what happened could have been seriously edited down for the sake of pacing; by that point in the narrative arc I really felt like I should have some idea where the story was going and some vague sense of how things would be resolved (or, at the very least, what there was to resolve). Then, suddenly, things take off & I spent the last quarter-to-a-third of the book trying to hold on & keep up as she threw critical revelation after critical revelation at me in a way that felt a bit tacked-on & not really tied into everything that came before. I am not even kidding that the last 20 pages contained enough richness and new material for an entire other book. If McKinley could have tightened up the middle of the book, spent some time hinting/alluding to some of the stuff you find out only at the end & connecting it to those middle chapters, then expanded the last 20 pages into, say, 100 or so, I think it could have been a really fantastic book.
Still, it was worth reading on a plane just to compare to Beauty and see how the story had morphed in her mind during those intervening two decades.