Beauty

Rating:
Summary: My favorite book ever!
Review: As I was browsing in a used bookstore one day, I was attracted to this book by the cover and the simple title. Over the past 10 years, I have gone back to this book again and again. I fall in love every time! The romance between Beauty and Giles is one of the most beautiful I have read anywhere. I am fascinated by time travel, fairy tales, and the struggle to discover identity, and Tepper skillfully weaves all these and more into a simply wonderful story. After reading this, I went out and looked for her other books, but the only one I would recommend beyond Beauty is "A Plague of Angels". My only caveat: some of Tepper's ideas are very liberal, but don't let that stop you from discovering this priceless book.

Rating:
Summary: my first Tepper
Review: Beauty was my first Sheri Tepper book, and I have been hooked ever since. The only reason I would give Beauty only four stars was because I liked some of her other novels even better, such as Gibbon's Decline and Fall, The Gate to Women's Country and Family Tree, among others.
Tepper always astounds me with her main plot device, the revelation of an almost horrific yet glorious truth about the world (the fictional one in the novel.) There is a profound betrayal of humanity set simultaneously with a triumph of hope for humanity. In Beauty this is the complete death of magic, including the beauty of life, to be followed (or preceded) by "saving" all that was beautiful in the world.
If you do not like your first Tepper, I believe it is unlikely you will enjoy any of them, however, if you read one and are blown away, you will love them all.

Rating:
Summary: A Fairy Tale With A Difference
Review: Tepper's version of the "real life" events that inspired numerous fairy tales (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc.) was certainly an interesting book, if ultimately anticlimactic. Tepper follows the title character, the half-fairy Beauty, through the events of her life as told by the main character herself through a journal.

I have to admit, I am finding writing this review a bit difficult. Beauty was an odd story. For about the first half of the book I didn't much care for the way Tepper had chosen to write this book...from the point of view of the journal. But then that grew on me and I could see that it had advantages...the point of view gave me, the reader, the best possible vantage point from which to best understand Beauty's rather disjointed life.

The worlds Tepper draws in this book are a bit lopsided. Some of them are drawn beautifully, while others lack much substance. Chinanga, especially, is wonderfully drawn...while the 14th and 15th centuries lack much depth -- with the possible exception of Westfaire. (There is an irony in all of this, but one that I cannot reveal for fear of giving too much of the book away.)

The characterizations in this book weren't the best. While I understood the overall motives of the characters; I found that the motives of individual events of many of the characters were somewhat unclear...especially towards the end (Carabosse in particular). The exception to this would be the main character, Beauty. At each step along the way I understood how she felt, and if I had been placed in her circumstances I would have reacted as she had, felt what she did. Beauty is the reason I'm giving this book four stars instead of three. She makes this book stand out more than it would have otherwise. An apt comparison might be an above-average performance in an only average film.

Tepper's Beauty is a rather poetic, if at times unidealistic, work of fiction. Though in the end, Tepper does manage to portray an overall sense of idealism in some of humanity, if not all. This book is recommended to those interested in unusual fairy tales, those with a penchant for Irish lore, or just those interested in a book that is a bit tough to sum up once one has turned the last page, read the last word.