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On her sixteenth birthday, Beauty, daughter of Philip, Duke of Montfort, Westfaire and Ylles, sidesteps the sleeping curse placed upon her by her wicked aunt, the fairy Carabosse -- only to be kidnapped by voyeurs from another time and place, far from the picturesque castle in 14th century England.
Captivating, uncompromising and unforgettable, Beauty will carve its own unique place in the hearts and minds of readers
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Like much of Tepper's fiction, this book is driven by a controlled fury. She sees the destruction of beauty all around us by those who believe humanity has a right to use up the rest of nature, and this book is a stark warning that if we don't change our ways we will destroy the world. Her heroine is the guardian of all that is beautiful in the world, of all that is being devoured by human greed. An angry novel, it makes its point heavy-handedly in places, but with great poignancy overall. It's a powerful and thought-provoking read. Elizabeth Sourbut
The middle sections of the book, however, were profoundly disappointing, not to say unsettling. This was not so much because of the journeying through time, although I thought that a poorly-incoporated plot-device, but the nature of the challenges the protaganist encounters. Whilst I think that very disturbing themes can successfully and sensitively be encorporated into fairy-tale fantasy fiction (and Robin McKinley's wonderful "Deerskin" is a great example of this) I felt that in Tepper's "Beauty", these themes were presented almost as arguments to prove various "points". This is not to say I'm not in favour of novels which address issues of gender equality or exploitation, or of man's relation to the environment, it is just that I felt that these points felt laboured within "Beauty". This laboured approach is perhaps most tellingly demonstrated in the account of the heroine's visit to hell, which was rather medieval in its almost smug descriptions of the physical discomfiture of those who had transgressed, particularly against women. There should be better, stronger and higher arguments against rape than that the perpetrator will suffer for it. (I also felt that a book which took such a strong moral position in relation to some issues ought not to have contained some of the disturbing assumptions it did: that, for example, the heroine's daughter can be evil and tainted from birth.)
The overall tone of the book, then, feels didactic, with many characters seeming reduced to cyphers or stereotypes so that individuals fail to disrupt the "pattern" of the very flawed world Tepper presents her reader with.
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