A strange imprisonment

Beauty has never liked her nickname. She is thin and awkward; it is her two sisters who are the beautiful ones. But what she lacks in looks, she can perhaps make up for in courage.

When her father comes home with the tale of an enchanted castle in the forest and the terrible promise he had to make to the Beast who lives there, Beauty knows she must go to the castle, a prisoner of her own free will. Her father protests that he will not let her go, but she answers, "Cannot a Beast be tamed?"

Robin McKinley's beloved telling illuminates the unusual love story of a most unlikely couple: Beauty and the Beast.

Kind Beauty grows to love the Beast at whose castle she is compelled to stay and through her love releases him from the spell which had turned him from a handsome prince into an ugly beast.

1966-1988 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)

1979 Fanfare Honor List (The Horn Book)

1979 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)

2000 List of Popular Paperbacks for YA

Robin McKinley won the 1985 Newbery Medal for her book The Hero and the Crown, and a 1983 Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword, both set in mythical Damar. She is also the author of Beauty, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. She lives in England.

In Her Own Words...

"I was an only child and my father was in the Navy. We moved every year or two?California, Japan, upstate New York, New England. I early found the world of books much more satisfactory than the unstable so-called real world. I can?t remember the first time I read Frances Hodgson Burnett?s but this particular story, about a little girl all alone in a strange land who told stories so wonderful that she believed them herself, fasci-nated me. I never quite lived up to Sara Crewe?s standard, but I tried awfully hard.

"Writing has always been the other side of reading for me; it never occurred to me not to make up stories. Once I got old enough to realize that authorship existed as a thing one might aspire to, I knew it was for me. I even majored in English literature in college, a good indication of my fine bold disdain for anything so trivial as earning a living; I was going to be a writer, like Dickens and Hardy and George Eliot. And Kipling and H. Rider Haggard and J.R.R. Tolkien. I was, however, going to tell breathtaking stories about girls who had adventures. I was tired of the boys always getting the best parts in the best books. What with reading and making up my own stories, I spent most of my life in my head; about the only irresistible attraction reality had for me was in the shape of horses and riding. And I liked traveling. Perhaps because of my childhood, staying in one place for very long just seemed to me like a waste of opportunity.

"It?s funny, though, the things life does to you. Inadvertently I discovered myself settling down, looking for excuses not to climb on another airplane. I bought a house because I fell in love with it, and it was somewhere to leave the thousands of books I picked up everywhere I went. Later, I decided that I wanted something around that didn?t necessarily sit politely on a shelf till I took it down, so I bought a dog, a whippet I named Rowan. Insidiously I began liking it that tomorrow was going to be much like yesterday: walking the dog, sitting at the typewriter. I declared myself to have found home in my tiny house in a small village two-thirds of the way up the coast of Maine. I also, a little ruefully, concluded that my individual mix of the writer?s traditional absent-mindedness, a rather uncompromising feminism, and a naturally intransigent personality made marriage or any sort of permanent romantic attachment impractical. I didn?t actually think I was missing much; I liked being single.

"This no doubt explains?somehow?why I am now living in a small village in a very large house in Hampshire, England, with my husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson, three whippets, and a horse, and what seems to me, the only child and ex-solitary adult, about half a million Dickinson grandchildren rioting underfoot, down the corridors, and across the garden. When Peter and I decided to get married, it was obvious to me I was the one who had to emigrate; I was the military brat with lifelong experience of pulling up and moving on. So I dug up my tender new under-standing of ?home,? packed it very carefully, and brought it over here with me, with the eighty cartons of books and one bewildered whippet. It has taken root vigorously here, but the message to headquarters is very emphatic: ?Don?t you ever do this to us again.? I?m not likely to: I?ve planted over four hundred rosebushes in what were once Peter?s classic English garden borders?and look after them devotedly. I have the scars to prove it. I think I?ve discovered reality after all. I?m astonished at how interesting it is. It?s giving me more things to write stories about."