Parenthetical

How did I escape my nerdy fantasy-loving adolescence without ever reading this book? I’m not sure, but I intend to correct the oversight in my Twilight-loving students. Beauty has all the creature-of-the-night broody romance of Edward and Bella, with a little more self-actualization.

You know the story: Beauty’s dad gets lost in the woods and ends up indebted to a Beast. The Beast demands his daughter in payment. Beauty goes to live with the Beast, they fall in love, she breaks his spell, he turns out to be hot. (Unless it’s the Disney movie, in which case he turns out to be dopey and everyone wants the Beast back.)

This version adds all sorts of delicious Renaissance-era frontier-porny detail about farming and food and smithing and food and house-keeping and food. If you think this sounds boring, perhaps you should not be looking to me for your book recommendations. There are also many descriptions of gorgeous dresses and home furnishings, if that’s more your thing.

It’s a fun book, very dramatically romantic, and even though I knew what was going to happen, I got all caught up in it like the 13-year-old girl I secretly am.

The 30-year-old feminist lit crit part of me, though, has the following gripe. McKinley spends the first half of the book making sure we know how “ugly” Beauty is (the name is ironic; see what she did there?). She really lays it on thick. What should have happened is that as Beauty and the Beast fall in love, she comes to appreciate that she is beautiful even if she doesn’t have Standard Princess Face. What actually happens is that when everyone shows up for the wedding at the end and Beauty looks at herself in the mirror, she sees that she’s become “beautiful” in the traditional sense. Her family all notices it, too. There was no reason for her to change physically to mirror her internal change. Argh.

(Not that any of my students will care.)