pleasuretoburn 's review for:

Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper

2.0

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This book I had very high hopes for. As with a lot of women my age, I grew up on fairy tales. They have always been a part of my life, for better or worse. It seems like Tepper's novel will address "the worse" head-on. When you start reading this book, your internal book critic will scream with joy. "She is going to ask what happens to real women in fairy tale situations! She is going to examine the repercussions of all of that strictly enforced femininity in fairy tales! She is going to write a book about a beloved fairy tale character that sheds new light on the gender and class stratification even in our modern world!" But no. She writes a book that's half gritty fairy tale retelling and half sci-fi time adventure. The fairy tale aspect is actually very interesting, and the initial story is fun to read. It reads like an easily acceptable fantasy with a forbidden-by-class romance element. But then the curse kicks in. And while the travels that Beauty takes are interesting, her trip to her future (which is our future too) things take a turn for the worse, then it just goes all to crap. I get that that's the point, ultimately, but end of times and fairy tales, to my mind at least, are far too antithetical to really work in this way. Also, I feel like Tepper's authorial abuse of Beauty is just gratuitous. Instead of making Beauty into a real person, she punishes her for the negative effects of fairy tales on girls and women. Beauty is abandoned, brutalized, lost, and ultimately helpless to even enact change in the world. Beauty is static in the end. But not in a clever, "oh my gosh this writer gets it!" kind of way. She is just another woman who knows that things are bad and getting worse and is unable to put any good back into the world. I wanted so much from this book, and all of my hopes were disappointed. The first half of the book, and Beauty's fairy heritage do make for good reading for pleasure. Everything else--the brutality, the loss, the helplessness, the homelessness--kicks all that in the shins. Tepper had the chance to write a novel that examines culture and our future critically, and she did try, but ultimately, she failed.