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. ( )

I love this book. It is one of my favorites, and I try to reread it every couple of years. When his business went under, Beauty's father moved his family to the north with his future son-in-law. The area they moved to is on the edge of a haunted forest. When Beauty's father must return to the city, he gets lost on the way home and ends up in the forest, which leads him to an enchanted castle. When he takes a rose to give Beauty, a Beast tells him he must bring one of his daughters to the castle to live with him. Beauty volunteers to go. She is afraid at first because the Beast is large, and the castle appears deserted. She does get the feeling that she is not truly alone. She finds that the time she spends with the Beast shows her that he is not the terrifying monster she thought he was. Beauty discovers they have a lot in common and enjoys spending time with him. After a while, she starts hearing the voices of the enchanted beings in the castle. When Beauty learns the fate of her sister's fiancé, she asks the Beast to let her go home and tell the news. He tells her she has a week, but if she is gone longer than that, he will die.

I liked how Beauty's family was such a loving family, not the poor little girl abused type of family. I loved Beauty and her independence. She seemed very adaptable and handled her time at the castle very well. I also loved the way that she was able to look past the surface of the Beast and see who he was. I loved the enchantments in the castle and how real all of it felt. The library was incredibly awesome. There were some entertaining parts, like the argument between Beauty and the "breezes" over the silver dress was great. The ending was a perfect fairytale. ( )