Very engaging retelling of the classic Beauty and the Beast. I enjoyed it ! ( )

I have loved this book since I was in high school. This Beauty really resonated with me - a not-really-beautiful bookworm who is, by her own admission, better suited to manual tasks than embroidery. Watching her relationship with the Beast change until she can at last admit to herself his importance to her is enchanting. ( )

I loved this. Beauty and the Beast is my favourite fairytale and this retelling is simply magic. Beauty was an extremely loveable character who is genuine and hardworking and honest and fair and practical. She is smart and caring and adaptable to bad circumstances. But it's not just her, her entire family are the stars of this book. All of the secondary characters are well drawn and fully developed. Hope and Grace and Ger and Father are all fierce and caring and loveable characters in their own right. All that besides, it was so nice to see a family portrayed as loving and caring and loyal and defensive of each other. There was no real bickering or animosity between them, they all supported and cared for each other and the amount of love was perfect.

Although a fairytale of love and acceptance, the romance itself is of little importance. Mainly the author focuses on developing the friendship between Beauty and Beast and showing how they come to care about each other.

Something about this book screamed more. As in more than anything else. I can't place my finger on what the more is but it's there. It just felt more fleshed out and emotive than many retellings. ( )

Well crafted retelling and engaging to read. Sorta meh on the romance but thats just my usual attitude so. ( )

I think my problem with this book is not so much the book itself but the source material-- I realized as I was reading this that I just don't like the story of Beauty and the Beast. I have really never believed that Beauty fell in love with the Beast; it has always seemed more like a product of circumstance to me. Here is a young girl who is taken away from her family, isolated in an enchanted castle with only a beast for company. I think, in order to live out her life in a somewhat bearable manner, she has to come to sympathize with her captor.

That aside though, McKinley has created a wonderful story with lots of detail, and I particularly like how she describes all the enchantments in the castle. I also like that we learn more about Beauty's family and background. However, I feel that the interactions between the titular characters were very limited, so the revelation of their feelings for each other seemed too sudden. I think this is just McKinley's style; she writes little of the emotions of the characters, preferring the reader to infer them from their actions and words. I'm not sure it worked in this book, but I also think a part of this has to do with my general skepticism about the original fairytale. Sure, Beauty and the Beast respect each other and care for each other, and I do believe the Beast has romantic feelings for Beauty, but the other way around? It seems more like Stockholm Syndrome to me. ( )