Rose Daughter (original 1997; edition 1998)

Beauty was better. ( )

I'm not sure which of McKinley's [b:Beauty and the Beast|41424|Beauty A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast|Robin McKinley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1294192311s/41424.jpg|2321285] tellings I like better. I liked the simplicity of Beauty, but Rose Daughter is a little more grown up, and there's a little more world building, and I went a little deeper into it than with Beauty because it had more depth to go into. I enjoyed a lot of the descriptions and the bits of magic, and the foreshadowing for what actually happened at the end -- although I thought it could have done with more foreshadowing, so that the greenwitch had to do a little less explaining. This lost some of the simplicity of Beauty and the fairytale in general, but it kept enough to keep it firmly in the region of fairy tale, for me.

I liked the very end, that the Beast remained a Beast and that that was the happy ending. That's quite lovely: he doesn't have to change to have the love that he earned as a beast. ( )

I really liked this take on the Beauty and the Beast legend, probably because I'm a gardener, and McKinley is clearly a real gardener too. The reverential way she treats compost is worth the price of admission. I do find her writing style to be a little lush for my tastes sometimes, and this book is a good example of that lushness. It's very romantic, of course. I loved the cat parts almost as much as the garden parts. ( )

Fun fact: I always confuse the names Robin McKinley and Patricia McKillip. Not so much the writing, mind.

This is a perfectly competent retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It does some nice stuff with the care of roses as plot-and-symbolism. And I loved the fleshing out of her sisters and their lives.

Unfortunately the novel feels a bit like the author noted down the plot points from the fairy tale as goalposts and wrote the rest of the novel in between them: there's a certain disconnect. I'm reading along this perfectly nice story about Beauty and her sisters and "Oops, time for their father to go on a journey and ask what they want him to bring back and she says a rose." Or this perfectly nice story about Beauty with roses and things in the castle and "Oops, time for him to give her the rose and the speech about how when its petals have all fallen he'll be dead." The parts just don't blend as organically as they ought. ( )

Beauty and her two sisters were living in the lap of luxury with their successful father when suddenly everything changed. Her father's business failed, and they were left destitute. They made a new beginning in Rose Cottage, where things weren't quite what they seemed. The coming of Beauty's family to Rose Cottage was the first step to opening an ancient curse that would change their lives forever. This was an adorable little story...just as enjoyable as McKinley's first retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story. I was skeptical that McKinely could tell the story twice but, although there were some similarities, the two stories were very different. THIS Beauty used her magical gardening capabilities to change the world... ( )