author : Robin McKinley

The classic fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, retold in Robin McKinley's charming style.

McKinley gives an interesting twist on many of the story's features. For example: 'Beauty' is the bookish protagonist's childhood nickname, she is actually rather plain, and her real name is Honour. [When I first read the story, 20 years ago, the name Honour had fewer resonances for me than it does on re-reading it today]. Also, her sisters, Grace and Hope, ask their father to bring back jewels from his trip only as a joke; they are actually both nice people.

We get the story of the family's life before they encounter the Beast, and enough description of Beauty's time with the Beast that we understand why she could have fallen in love. The enchanted invisible ladies-in-waiting, with their matter-of-fact private conversations, who keep trying to force Beauty to wear over-glamorous clothes, are a perfect touch. And I would love to visit Beast's library, with all the books in the world, including the ones that haven't been written yet!

My only complaint is that the ending feels a little rushed: the rest of the standard tale is bulked out well, and I would have liked the events after the Beast's transformation to have been similarly expanded and deepened. But if my only complaint is that the story is too short, I suppose that can be taken as a compliment.

A retelling of four fairy tales

Contents (possible spoilers)

• The Stolen Princess

• The Princess and the Frog

• The Hunting of the Hind

• The Twelve Dancing Princesses

How Aerin, shunned daughter of a Northern witchwoman and King Arlbeth, becomes great in legend as Aerin Dragon-Killer, and weilder of the Blue Sword Gonturan.

The characters in McKinley's Damar tales are very vivid and well-drawn, yet there is a curiously appealing dreamlike quality to these stories. This is partly due, I suspect, to the sparsity of dialogue, and to the long sentences, each of which develops its theme at some length, but without being convoluted, clumsy, or difficult to read. And also, although some of the characters are petty, and a few downright evil, and the hero suffers in pursuit of her fate, there is no gratuitous nastiness or squalor, which some modern writers would use to add 'realism'. However the effect is achieved, these tales are a delight to read.

How the Outlander Harimad-sol wins the Blue Sword Gonturan, and how her fate is entwined with that of the legendary Lady Aerin.

Classic fairly tales have the hero or heroine born in poverty or facing some other trial, only to triumph and win the kingdom, the princess, or whatever. But what if that happy ending is not your heart's desire? Here McKinley gives us five touching stories, all written in her beautiful dreamlike prose, that explore this theme, delightfully twisting some of the fairy tale conventions.

Contents (possible spoilers)

• The Healer. 1982

Lily is a Healer, but born without a voice. Sahath is a mage who has lost his powers. Can Luthe cure them both?

• The Stagman. 1984

Princess Ruen's Regent Uncle is determined she will never become Queen. So he decides to revive an old tradition of sacrifice. But Luthe and the Stagman interfere with his plans.

• Touk's House. 1985

Erana is apprentice and adopted daughter of the witch-woman Maugie, yet finds she has no natural talent for herb-lore. But does Maugie have another reason for wanting her around?

• Buttercups. 1994

Coral and Pos seem an oddly matched couple, and there are suspicions that each has married the other for selfish reasons. Not until the trial of Buttercup Hill can their motives be made clear.

• A Knot in the Grain. 1994

Annabelle is an ordinary schoolgirl, lonely after she and her parents have moved to a new town. And she doesn't really believe in that box in the attic, does she?

Twenty years ago, Robin McKinley presented us with Beauty, a retelling of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. Now she has given us another one. (An Author's Note discusses the reasons for two separate retellings, where originally none had been intended.) I must write this review as a comparison, because her other tale is so well known to me.

The underlying plot is the same as before, obviously, but many of the details and emphases have been changed. The main changes are from a fantasy style to a more overt fairy tale style, accompanied by a change from first to third person narration. The enchantment on the castle is more magical: the corridors don't merely rearrange themselves on a day-to-day basis; they change constantly. And the appearance of the things Beauty requests are due to the global enchantment, not to the actions of prosaic individual helpers.

The backstory of the curse on the Beast is given a lot more prominence. Also, the characters are more complex: Beauty's two sisters, here called Lionheart and Jeweltounge (all the characters have 'meaningful' names) are not particularly nice people in the city, but once they move to the country after their father's business collapse, they change for the better (and now they do not ask their father to bring back anything, even as a joke, from his return trip to the city). And the events after the enchantment are broken are rather more complex, too.

The main difference, however, is that McKinley has discovered gardening in the interim, and there is a lot more about roses here. In fact, Beauty, here a gardener, spends most of her time at the Beast's castle in his glasshouse, cultivating his roses. And this is where the story falls down for me. She spends a mere seven enchanted days (seven months pass in the real world) at the castle, most of that time pruning and taking cuttings, not with the Beast. So I got no understanding for why she moved from fearing and pitying the Beast, to falling in love with him.

The book I actually want is a kind of root mean square of Beauty and Rose Daughter: the developing relationship between Beauty and the Beast of the former, along with the increased depth and complexity of the latter. (But I would even more prefer a new book about Damar.)

Robin McKinley presents us with another of her wonderful fairy-tale retellings; this time it's Sleeping Beauty.

The evil Pernicia curses the new-born princess on her name-day, that she will die by pricking her finger on a spindle, but the fairy Katriona snatches the baby away to raise her in safe secrecy. So Rosie grows up in the country, not knowing her background, but talking to the animals, becoming friends with the taciturn Smith, and making a name for herself as a plain-spoken horse doctor. Then three months before her fateful twenty-first birthday, she is rediscovered.

The story starts out almost self-consciously in fairy-tale style, but gathers more straightforward fantasy elements as it progresses, as we get to know the various characters better. It has more in common with the style of the early Beauty than of the more recent Rose Daughter, for example.

We get all of the fairy tales classic elements -- the fairy godmothers, the curse, the spinning wheel, the castle surrounded by thorns, the wakening kiss -- but with an unexpected twist and surprising rationale for all these elements, told with McKinley's own special combination of dreamlike prose and down-to-earth characters. So, despite it being such a well-known story, these twists add enough complexity, uncertainty and suspense that one is desperate to find out how on earth it can all end happily every after -- for it is a fairy-tale in the end, of course.

Six delightful fantasy tales from husband and wife authors Dickinson and McKinley. I've been a fan of McKinley for ages: her simple, dreamy prose evokes a wonderful feeling of character and place, and many of her heroines are the kind of down to earth sensible sorts one would like as a big sister, as well as being heroic champions. And Dickinson's style here, I discover, is similar. The blurb on the back cover states "They plan to write three other books in the Elementals sequence" -- I certainly hope so.

Contents (possible spoilers)

• Peter Dickinson. Mermaid Song. 2002

Pitiable Nasmith learned to sing the mermaid's song from her grandmother, never realising she would one day need it.

• Robin McKinley. The Sea-King's Son. 2002

Jenny, fleeing a disasterous encounter with her faithless fiance, unwittingly trips the curse that the sea-king laid on her village generations ago.

• Peter Dickinson. Sea Serpent. 2002

How Iril battled the giant sea serpent to transport the great standing stones to a new place.

• Robin McKinley. Water Horse. 2002

Tamia is stunned to be chosen as an apprentice by one of the Guardians, and is called one to use her new magic before she is fully trained.

• Peter Dickinson. Kraken. 2002

Two human lovers fleeing pirates are rescued from the depths by a mermaid. But they have disturbed the Kraken, who demands their return.

• Robin McKinley. A Pool in the Desert. 2002

A story of Damar. Hetta has realistic dreams of a strange desert land. When she researches it, she discovers it actually exists, and plans to travel there. But then she discovers that her dreams are of a past time in the land.

Sunshine was just an ordinary young woman, working in her family's coffee shop, minding her own business, until she went down to the lake one night. Then the vampires caught her, and chained her to a wall, food for one of their kind. She survived, but that turned out to be the least of her worries.

This is beautiful. McKinley's trademark dreamlike prose, used here in a kind of stream of consciousness narrative, gradually paints a picture of an ever-more fantastic world, and a very human protagonist caught up in events out of her control. The vampires, the magic, the cookery -- they are blended together into a seamless whole to produce a wonderfully rich, totally grounded world, full of splendid characters. The tension builds up slowly, until it is almost unbearable, leading to a thrilling denouement, with no certainty about how it is going to be resolved.

There are enough loose ends either for a host of sequels, or to signal that this is just a story in an on-going world. Either way, there is sufficient satisfactory closure to make this an excellent stand-alone story.

14-year-old Jake Mendoza is the son of the Director of Smokehill National Park, one of the few dragon sanctuaries on the planet. Few people have ever even seen a dragon, but there are just enough (hated) tourists and (measly) government grants to keep the place running on a shoestring. Then Jake not only sees a dragon: he comes across a dead poacher, and the dying dragon he shot as she was giving birth. Jake rescues the sole surviving dragonlet, a highly illegal action that could land him and the whole National Park in deep trouble if anyone discovered it...

This took me a while to get into, as it is told in a breathless 14-year-old's voice that initially has a lot of texture, and a lot of scene-setting, but not much dragon-action. However, when the action gets going, it does so with a vengeance. The description is marvellous: one really feels the exhaustion, the heat, the Headache, and the rugged beautiful wilderness of the park. The plot developments are great, as the secrets that Jake needs to keep just get bigger and bigger. And it's very disarming when the more implausible events are narrated by someone who says "look, I don't believe it either, but this is what happened".

Contents (possible spoilers)

• James P. Blaylock. Paper Dragons. 1985

• Patricia A. McKillip. The Old Woman and the Storm. 1985

• Robert Westall. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. 1985

• Peter Dickinson. Flight. 1985

• Jane Yolen. Evian Steel. 1985

• P. C. Hodgell. Stranger Blood. 1985

• Michael de Larrabeiti. The Curse of Igamor. 1985

• Joan D. Vinge. Tam Lin. 1985

• Robin McKinley. The Stone Fey. 1985