Review - Rose Daughter

I'm not sure which of McKinley's Beauty and the Beast tellings I like better. I liked the simplicity of Beauty, but Rose Daughter is a little more grown up, and there's a little more world building, and I went a little deeper into it than with Beauty because it had more depth to go into. I enjoyed a lot of the descriptions and the bits of magic, and the foreshadowing for what actually happened at the end -- although I thought it could have done with more foreshadowing, so that the greenwitch had to do a little less explaining. This lost some of the simplicity of Beauty and the fairytale in general, but it kept enough to keep it firmly in the region of fairy tale, for me.

I liked the very end, that the Beast remained a Beast and that that was the happy ending. That's quite lovely: he doesn't have to change to have the love that he earned as a beast.