- Paperback: 476 pages
- Publisher: Collins; New edition edition (26 July 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0586213058
- ISBN-13: 978-0586213056
- Product Dimensions: 17.4 x 11.4 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,078,136 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Beauty (Fantasy Masterworks)
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Beauty is the half mortal, half fairy daughter of a 14th century English duke. A fairy curse puts the entire household into an extended sleep, but Beauty escapes using a magic cloak. Outside the castle, she is captured by a film crew from the 21st century who have come to film the end of magic. Beauty lives for a while in the overpopulated, ugly 21st century where nature has been completely destroyed by humans and magic no longer works. She escapes, and her subsequent adventures take her to imaginary countries, the land of Faery, the late 20th century (where she is brutally raped), and to various times during her own century where her descendants become, in turn, Cinderella, Snow White and the Frog Prince.
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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Product Description
Beginning with a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, set in 14th-century England, this book develops into a novel that ranges in time and space from the 14th century to the 21st and from the real world to imaginary countries, the realm of Faerie and the depths of Hell.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
First of all, it is worth noting that this book is EXTREMELY well-written (at least in my opinion) and I genuinely enjoyed both its opening and its conclusion.
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. For my personal tastes, too, the conclusion had a rather weak spirituality, whilst the proposal that the "flawed" world should be allowed to self-destruct, only to allow a new one to spring from the seed of the sleeping Beauty, seemed to destroy the significance of all the novel's (under-developed) characters apart from the protagonist.
All this said, I read the novel quite a number of years ago, and it has clearly made a very strong impression on me! I was tempted to give this work only 2 stars, but I realised that my deepest criticisms of at are rather personal: others may find Tepper's concentration on issues rather than characters refreshing, and her style enthralling.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is Sleeping Beauty with a twist, and definitely not intended for children, as it's an enchanting but also frightening retelling of this much loved fairytale. We hear about how Beauty evades the sleeping curse, by getting it placed on her half-sister instead. She manages to escape from the castle by using a magic cloak that takes her into the 21st century. She does lots of time traveling and visits strange and wonderful places - from this world, to the future, to a world of imagination, Fairyland and even Hell. Fairyland was my favorite; Sheri Tepper really brought it to life with her wonderful vivid, descriptive writing. A lot of my favorite fairy tales are woven together in this book, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzal, Frog Prince, Tam Lin and Snow White are a few of them, and they are all given a marvelous slant . There are some very scary moments, particularly a traumatic rape scene, in which I think Tepper is trying to explain the possible outcome of mankind's use of senseless violence and pornography. Underneath this magnificent retelling of our well loved fairytales is a message that mankind is destroying nature, and if we don't wake-up to what we are doing then we will destroy the world as we know it. I can't decide what genre I would put this book in as it's part sci-fi, part time-travel and part fantasy. It's a mix that worked marvelously well for me. I will definitely be reading some more of Tepper's books.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This was only the the second of the "Fantasy Masterworks" that I bought for the simple reason that I'd already read most of the others. I admit to being a little disappointed here. Starting out OK with the story of Beauty, a 14th century noblewoman who's really the daughter of a faerie, it jumps, via a time machine, to a ghastly overpopulated future then to our time. Beauty becomes a 20th Century girl, gets raped and then returns to the 14th Century.
All of this dislocates you from the original mediaval setting and the return, when she starts enacting various fairy tales in one role or another, suffers from this. There's some interesting stuff in Faerieland and a trip to Hell later, but it all suffers from the 20th Century gloss that Tepper puts over everything. And you get the feeling that Tepper has contrived all this to make a number of feminist points, something the book also suffers from. All of this ends up feeling horribly artificial.
Despite all this, it remains a good book. Ignore the 20th Century gloss and feminist propoganda and you can see that it could have been a classic.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
I have had become a big Tepper fan after reading her book Margarets...and when i had the chance to read Sideshow, the like increased to love.... Read more
Published 16 months ago by ViktorijaA
Beauty + Beast
This is a very clever exploration of socio-cultural norms and values through 'fantasy/folk tales/time travel'. Read more
Published 20 months ago by skd
love this book!
This is a brilliant, and poignant book which makes you worry for the future, however enjoy the past and folklaw. I love this book! :D
Published on 11 Feb 2010 by L. J. White
Magical twist
This is Sleeping Beauty with a twist, and definitely not intended for children, as it's an enchanting but also frightening retelling of this much loved fairytale. Read more
Published on 10 Oct 2006 by kehs
.
Other reviewers have extended the opinion that Beauty is hyperbolic and oversimplistic. Although it must be admitted that the author has, at times, abandoned invention for the... Read more
Published on 11 May 2006 by Gregori Fairchild
Fairy Tales and SF
This book nicely defies categories - it plays with ideas from many sources, and builds them into a satisfying whole. Read more
Published on 18 Jan 2005 by Dragon
A truly adult fairy tale
I must confess to being a long-standing fan of Tepper's work having first encountered her wonderful imagination in a second-hand copy of "The True Game". Read more
Published on 30 Sep 2004 by Kalanisoi
Beauty - A modern Fairytale
The thing that interested me most about 'Beauty' is the fact that it starts off as a traditional fairy tale - instantly recognisable to any Disney fans or Brothers Grimm readers -... Read more
Published on 1 Oct 2003
Brilliant! Drives a blade into our current social identity
I thought that Sheri S. Tepper could not disturb me more than when she wrote "Gibbons Decline and Fall", but she has. Read more
Published on 25 Dec 2001
Truly a classic
I have read most of Sheri s Tepper's books in chronological order, starting with The Gate To Women's Country. Read more
Published on 18 July 2001 by Valerie Gerrard
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fantasy
- Books > Science Fiction > Classics
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
