I love those too, and also The Hero and the Crown. And Deerskin, which was a very healing book for me. And some of her short stories are lovely.
I think you can see elements of "Beauty" even in books which aren't full retellings. In The Blue Sword, the heroine is taken away from her familiar home by a strange, initially frightening man whom she grows to love. There's even the sequence near the end where she returns briefly to her old home, then runs back to her new one. In The Hero and the Crown, there's no frightening but non-villainous man, but she does take a trip to the magical home of a strange man, where she is changed.
Sunshine is interesting because it's the only one where the Beast figure really is alien and eerie, as opposed to just being a man whose strangeness only requires getting used to.
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Date: 2019-01-27 09:54 pm (UTC)I think you can see elements of "Beauty" even in books which aren't full retellings. In The Blue Sword, the heroine is taken away from her familiar home by a strange, initially frightening man whom she grows to love. There's even the sequence near the end where she returns briefly to her old home, then runs back to her new one. In The Hero and the Crown, there's no frightening but non-villainous man, but she does take a trip to the magical home of a strange man, where she is changed.
Sunshine is interesting because it's the only one where the Beast figure really is alien and eerie, as opposed to just being a man whose strangeness only requires getting used to.