Robin McKinley, Day 2!
I thought Rose Daughter would be a good follow up to Beauty since it's McKinley's second shot at "Beauty and the Beast." According to the book description, this one was written 20 years after Beauty. McKinley had 20 years to think about how to revamp the fairy tale and her own novel, and it shows.
Still, I have issues with Rose Daughter. It is more cleverly written, which is highly enjoyable. It feels more like it's written for adults who love fairy tales, rather than teenagers who are still children. The roses also still play a very important role, and the family undergoes the same financial ruin. I love that the sister's are much stronger characters. They are modern women doing things for themselves instead of being taken care of by the men in their lives, as they were in Beauty. These girls build and create and get dirty! Their father is much weaker, giving the sisters an opportunity to be strong and independent, but they all still depend on each other. Their relationships strengthen and evolve a great deal after they move to the country.
There are also parts of the novel where it just becomes difficult to follow. It's harder than normal to imagine what the palace of the Beast looks like; it's almost as if the physical appearance of the castle changes, not just the inside of it. Either that or McKinley can't decide what it really looks like in her own mind. The only thing that is consistent about the palace is the glass house. Obviously, this is because it's supposed to be this way. Beauty even comments on the fact that it's the only thing she sees that never looks any different. However, it's more than the fact that the castle's interior changes. I have issues with the way McKinley describes what Beauty sees when she looks outside. Beauty seems to think what she views from her windows stays the same, but I don't get that feeling from reading the descriptions.
There are simply some things though that feel like she just had writer's block and tossed in some easy backups. One of these is the introduction of the unicorns. They just pop in with no warning and serve no purpose. The old woman that Beauty meets calls the unicorns her "moon- and starlight friends," but nothing ever explains their reason for being there. They are brought in so abruptly that I had to stop reading for a few minutes to get over the slight shock of finding imaginary creatures in such a novel about mere magic. At one point, the unicorns save Beauty's life, but anything from within the spell could have easily done the same thing. The unicorns aren't part of the Beast's imprisonment, so it did not make any sense to put them in the novel. If McKinley had a good reason for them, I still haven't figured out what it is. Unicorns are more useful in stories meant for small children, unless they are the focus of the book, such as in Bruce Coville's Unicorn Chronicles series.
On a brighter note, the characters are enough to make this novel a credit to McKinley's writing skills, but, as I said before, this is just a part of the virtues and disappointments that go along with loving Robin McKinley as an author.
0 comments:
Post a Comment