rose daughter by robin mckinley
this weekend I finished rose daughter (robin mckinley's SECOND beauty & the beast retelling). I think I liked it? I read this directly after beauty, which I had worried might be too much, but actually turned out okay, mostly because I think I just love beauty & the beast fanfic.
rose daughter was written something like 20 years after beauty. they share many of the same plot beats... but where beauty focused a lot more on life before the beast (I feel like beauty didn't even meet the beast until halfway through the book?), rose daughter sort of focuses on beauty building a new life after she moves on from the rose cottage.
not only is there more time spent with the beast, but it feels like there's also a lot more settling in, falling into new routines, seeing which parts of beauty's old life manage to hang around in her new environment...
this makes a ton of sense with what the author has to say about her life stage at this point (1996):
Five years ago I moved to England to marry the writer Peter Dickinson. I was happy in Maine, where I had been living, with my typewriter, one whippet, and several thousand books, in my little lilac-covered cottage on the coast. And then I found myself three thousand miles away, in another country, living in an enormous, ramshackle house surrounded by flower-beds and covered in wisteria and clematis and ancient climbing roses whose names no one remembered.
I don't know why the story came to me in the first place, but I know that what fueled the whirlwind of getting it down on paper was my grief for my little lilac-covered cottage and for a way of life I had loved, even if I love my new life better.
I think I almost like the book better with this context in mind. because the thing about rose daughter is that I liked it and also I thought it was incredibly tedious. I gave it 3.5 stars (rounded up to 4) but also added it to my "bored me to death" bookshelf - that's how confused I am about it.
the challenge I experienced while reading is two-fold:
(1) the writing is hella clunky, with lots of sentence clauses linked together, and terrible syntax, and characters interrupting themselves to go on tangents before coming back to the topic at hand. this is an especially egregious passage:
The wallpaper – what could be seen of it – all bore small climbing roses in different colours, and the table that stood in the centre of the first room, so that Beauty had to go round it to reach the next, had roses carved in relief round its edge, and inlaid in exquisitely tinted pietra dura across its surface; the stems of the torchères, standing in slender elegant clusters in every corner, were wound round with roses, and tiny rosebuds surrounded each individual candle; a stone maiden, not unlike the one Beauty had seen in the pool in the front garden, stood holding a bowl of roses over her head, whose brim she had tipped, and she was so covered by a cascade of stony roses that all of her that was visible were an eye, one cheek, a smiling mouth, and the tips of her toes.
at times, the writing reminded me of diana wynne jones' books, perhaps meant to feel whimsical and chaotic... but more often than not, it read more like a stream of consciousness from someone with raging ADHD (just read my blog and you'll see what I mean! just kidding – please don't read my blog).
(2) there was so. much. description. of the palace. like unreasonable amounts of description. as we know, the beast's palace runs on magic, but in rose daughter the magic has... undertones to it. things are constantly changing – the furniture in any given room, the number of doors, the views out the window – and beauty spends a lot of time cataloguing all the shifts.
maybe there is plot value in this, but I'm convinced 30% of this book is just a never-ending house tour. I skimmed a lot because I could not bear to read another sentence about the patterns in the carpet, or the bric-a-brac on a side table, or the star on the floor with the eight – no, twelve – no, eleven, points.
so, rose daughter was awkward and meandering at times, and I felt my eyes glazing through so much of it. BUT I also found the story more compelling and more developed compared to beauty.
I mean, beauty was a perfect fluffy fairytale story. but rose daughter had more of a bite to it. it's a story where magic is a little bit... dangerous(?) in its unpredictability.
she had made her choice, and now she put one slow, heavy foot down after the other by her own will and of her own choice, and while each footstep was very hard, dragged as it was in the opposite direction, it was also a victory for her, and the hum changed its inaudible note and became fury.
it's also a story about starting over, and making a life, and navigating community, and creating your own happiness.
It was foolish to talk of hating him — foolish and wasteful. What had happened had happened, like anything else might happen, like a bit of paper giving you a new home when you had none finding its way into your hand, like a company of the ugliest, worst-tempered plants you'd ever seen opening their flowers and becoming rose-bushes, the most beautiful, lovable plants you've ever seen.
I liked reading those themes and living out those days alongside beauty, having that little taste of a slice of life.
this book reminded me of the fables I used to read as a child, always with a lesson to take away at the end. I often felt as though robin mckinley was imparting her own wisdom on us.
it had been Beauty then who had done what needed to be done, while all [Jeweltongue] and Lionheart could see was that their pride and arrogance had shattered like glass, and the shards lay all round them, and it was as if they cut themselves to the bone with every move they made. And so they had moved slowly, had been able to see no farther than across the room, across the present minute.
I very much liked the themes that robin mckinley baked in from her own life stage at the time.
The precariousness of their present life suddenly appeared to her as if she stood on the brink of a literal abyss, staring into it till the impenetrable darkness made her dizzy. She knelt heavily, feeling the cool dampness seep through her skirts to chill her knees, and scooped up a little earth in her hands, scrabbling at it, ending up with a handful of earthworms and wild violet roots for her pains. But it made her laugh — weeding with her fingernails — and the real weight of the earth comforted her.
I also very much liked that both beauty and the beast got to be their own people in this book...? there was no library in this one, but the beast now has interests! he paints! he eats apples! he has very good lore! and all of those details help make his relationship with beauty just a little more believable too. he's not just twiddling his thumbs waiting to be loved, waiting to be a man again. I mean, yes perhaps there is some of that, but there's also more depth this time around.
He made his own restless motion, plucking at the edge of his gown, as she had seen him do before. The fabric rippled and glistened in the candlelight, seeming to turn of its own volition to show off its black sheen, like a cat posing for an audience. She repressed the urge to stroke it, to quiet the Beast's hand by placing her own over it.
the thing about a retelling (or fanfic in general) is that so much of the heavy lifting is already done – relationships, storylines, settings, backgrounds. everything is that much easier to buy into because the reader is borrowing from existing media to fill in the gaps. but I liked that robin mckinley gave us new stuff to consider, a new way to think about beauty & the beast and the curse and tropes that have become so familiar, all without taking us too far from the original material...
"I think I will choose to believe that you would miss being able to see in the dark, and to be careless of the weather, and to walk as silently as sunlight. Because I love my Beast, and I would miss him very much if he went away from me and left me with some handsome stranger."
that's kind of the funny thing about retellings – the farther away you get from the original story, the more it feels like its own newfangled thing. and that can be cool (uprooted!) but sometimes all I want is that original story, just from a slightly different angle. which is exactly what rose daughter is: beauty & the beast AU fanfic written in the style of howl's moving castle. ha!
I've been rambling so much that hopefully by now I've done this book some kind of justice. its flaws are definitely easier to describe than its strengths, which feel much more subtle...? but I'll land here with a final line from the author's note:
I read somewhere, a long time ago, a French writer, I think, saying that each writer has only one story to tell; it's whether or not they find interesting ways to retell it that is important.
I definitely think robin mckinley found interesting ways to retell this story, and I would definitely read a third retelling from her if she were to publish one.