Beauty

I'm so very glad to be finished with this book. It is not horribly written, but nor was it a joy to read. It was based on fairy tales, and sat on my shelf for some twenty-odd years, so I figured I needed to give it a fair shake. I really did want to like it. The writing itself is excellent, but it is incredibly hard to enjoy it much. It's like being hit with a hammer time and time again, the hammer, of course, being Tepper's message. I think I'll stay away from her books from now on.

I can appreciate her message. she's writing about a cause that very much concerns me. The fact that humans overuse, overpopulate, and do not think, or choose to blame anyone but themselves. But the way she goes about telling her message seems to belie her point–that we destroy beauty by our greed and inherent darkness. That we revel in our darkness, and therefore deserve what we get. So she goes on to tell us a horrifically dark story about the death of Beauty. How is that any different from what she is condemning?

Beauty herself is an interesting character, but only vaguely, and it is only the fairy tale parts of her life that truly interested me. I will say that I did enjoy how Tepper manages to set her and her fairy tales into the real historical world in a believable way. The other characters in the story were either blank slates for Beauty to decide how we should feel about them, or so abhorrent as to repel.

Tepper's knowledge is obviously quite good, but she's like the student who stuffs their paper with three times the amount of sources, and repeats their point more times than any teacher would ever think necessary. The imaginary world Beauty finds herself in for a time, for instance. Very much a rationalist construct, but it felt incredibly out of place in this fairy tale-driven story. Though too, so did her time in the present and future. Then there was Tepper's long list of fae and creatures of the fairy realm that she suddenly dumps on us at the very end of the book. Sure, we have met some before that time, but the list seemed to come from nowhere and was entirely unnecessary to the story itself.

The time travel aspect, especially to the dark future that Beauty is dragged to, seems entirely too much. Coming at the point of the story it does, so close to the beginning of her story, it seems only to illustrate her point of “People are bad.” Worse, she then goes on to point out how horrible writers are for writing dark things in their stories, thereby causing us to become immured to these horrors. What, then, is her point? Isn't this what she herself is doing? To me, it feels like a rant drawn out far too long, with no true purpose but to scold everyone who will listen.

Read it for the fairy tales if you must, but otherwise, I just wouldn't recommend it.