In Rose Daughter, McKinley expands on and enhances Beauty, a book she wrote twenty years earlier. Both are retellings of the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.

I actually liked Beauty, the shorter work of the two, better as I didn’t feel that Rose Daughter added anything meaningful that wasn’t already there. Part of what’s missing for me is the natural progression in Beauty’s relationship with The Beast – i.e. from fear to love through trust and compassion. In this book Beauty shows little or no terror at being completely uprooted from her family and forced to cohabitate with a beast-like creature. As a result, her ultimate love for this creature is less satisfying to the reader than it could have been. Still, I recommend it to readers who continue to enjoy the magic of fairy tales, adults included.

McKinley shouldn’t have attempted a reworking of this story. Her fist book, Beauty, told the story much much better. In Rose Daughter, I tended to get lost in the descriptions and back story.

s’good, charming, very pretty. two complaints—there’s twice as much about the setting as the characters, which feels off-balanced, and there are so many clauses that her sentences often get lost in themselves. it’s sweet, though.

Enjoyable, not sure what she adds to earlier/other renditions of this tale though.