Beauty

By Robin McKinley. "A retelling of the story of Beauty & the Beast."

I'm afraid this might be getting a little tiring by now, but this is another classic. Just read it.

Actually, I had never heard of it before it was mentioned in Circuit of Heaven, but probably everyone else has.

Reading a story like this is like rereading another book: you already know what's going to happen, generally, since you've seen the Disney movie (right?), so you can concentrate on how it happens and take your time reading it, instead of hurrying to finish it because you want to know what comes next. It's practically guaranteed that this story will have a happy ending, although I did start to get worried near the end. And the details are quite different from the Disney version, probably closer to the original fairy tale...

The Beast's explanation of the curse at the end seems to neglect how he knows so much magic. It also seems to gloss over what the maids knew about the curse, oddly... otherwise, this is a pretty well done book, not too trite and cliched until perhaps the very end, which seems to come rather suddenly. But, it's definitely worth reading if any fairy tale is.