GENRE: Fiction/Fairy Tales
SETTING: Late 19th century, unknown location
MY GRADE: C
SYNOPSIS: Beauty has never liked her nickname. She is thin and awkward; it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage.
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. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?"
MY THOUGHTS: This was pretty boring. It's 247 pages and got better when Beauty met the Beast about 102 pages in during part three, but even then it was pretty uneventful. How the author made this differ from the original was she added a whole lot more to the beginning, giving Beauty and her family's backstory. She gave Beauty two sisters only, Hope and Grace, and gave each of them plot lines of their own, with finding spouses, but I wasn't at all interested in that. This was fleshed out in all the wrong places. All the added storyline should have happened later when Beauty met Beast.
I like that there was more magic in this than the original, with clothes and food appearing, and with the rose seeds she plated at her home in the beginning, and such. Beauty was sort of made to be the opposite of that word in this and in fact her real name here is Honour. Hair color wasn't mentioned in the original for either Beauty or Beast but in this her hair's 'mousy, neither blond nor brown' and has 'muddy hazel' eyes and she's eighteen. The Beast, before he turned into a beast and after he turned back into a human, has curly brown hair with gray, and brown eyes, age unknown, and is 'alarmingly handsome.'
The negatives about this novel: I wish the scene where Beauty returns to the Beast after having been away a short time had been more dramatic, though it was more so than in the original. The author is American but she spells words like she's British (colour, Honour, splendour, grey, sombre) and I don't understand why. I also don't like Beauty reading well-known authors and books (Sherlock Holmes, Sir Walter Scott, Bleak House) in this story. The Beast explains the reason for the curse that was put on him 200 years before but it's so lame and puzzling an explanation.
I read the original here and I do like it a lot because it's short and to the point, not dragged out. Pictured is the original 1978 hardcover book cover.
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