Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
compelling, but thoughtless and didactic, 27 Nov 2005
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.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magical Twist, 10 Oct 2006
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magical twist, 10 Oct 2006
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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by Hope Mirrlees
by Patricia A. Mckillip
by M. John Harrison
by Sheri S. Tepper
