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Book Review: Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
Dec. 18th, 2014 02:34 pmTitle: Beauty
Author: Sheri S. Tepper
Published: New York: Bantam, 2009 (1991)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 463
Total Page Count: 149,429
Text Number: 438
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A half-fairy girl goes on a long journey to discover the fate of magic in a changing world. Normally I approach Tepper like Atwood's genre writing: message-driven to the point of transparency, but sympathetic and consistently well-written. But Beauty is a mess of a book. It begins as a Sleeping Beauty retelling but crams in Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and the Frog Prince, growing increasingly predictable; it spans a lifetime and jumps between half a dozen settings, the worst of which is an ill-conceived environmental dystopia--yet the book says so little. It's a ham-fisted morality tale about the sins of environmental destruction and ... horror novels, I guess? because they best represent humanity's desensitization to violence and evil? It's sanctimonious, plodding, and runs a hundred pages too long. This is the first of Tepper's novels to disappoint me and I by no means recommend it.
Author: Sheri S. Tepper
Published: New York: Bantam, 2009 (1991)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 463
Total Page Count: 149,429
Text Number: 438
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A half-fairy girl goes on a long journey to discover the fate of magic in a changing world. Normally I approach Tepper like Atwood's genre writing: message-driven to the point of transparency, but sympathetic and consistently well-written. But Beauty is a mess of a book. It begins as a Sleeping Beauty retelling but crams in Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, and the Frog Prince, growing increasingly predictable; it spans a lifetime and jumps between half a dozen settings, the worst of which is an ill-conceived environmental dystopia--yet the book says so little. It's a ham-fisted morality tale about the sins of environmental destruction and ... horror novels, I guess? because they best represent humanity's desensitization to violence and evil? It's sanctimonious, plodding, and runs a hundred pages too long. This is the first of Tepper's novels to disappoint me and I by no means recommend it.
