BEAUTY
Sheri S. Tepper
Bantam, 1992
ISBN: 0-553-29527-6 (paperback)
Drawing on the wellspring of tales such as "Sleeping Beauty," Beauty is a moving
noevel of love and loss, hope and despair, magic and nature. Set against a backdrop both
enchanted and frightening, the story begins with a wicked aunt's curse that will afflict a young
woman named Beauty on her sixteenth birthday. Though Beauty is able to sidestep tragedy, she
soon finds herself embarked on an adventure of vast consequences. For it becomes clear that the
enchanted places of this fantasical world - a place not unlike our own - are in danger and must be
saved before it is too late.
A Note from the Author of Beauty (from: Beauty, Bantam Spectra,
New York 1992)
"Durig the lawst few years we've all been made increasingly aware of the destruction of habit
that's been going on all over the world - in rainforests, wetlands, deerts, the high tudra. When I
drive from Denver down to Santa Fe, I see the river valley where I gre up now packed with
houses cheek by jowl. Ther used to be cattail swamps along there, and I remember lying for
hours in the tall grass loking for whatever it was that sounded excatly like a plumber's plunger
being squished. The bird was at least bittern, but there aren's any swamp bird anymore because
the swamps have all been drained and the trees cut down to build a golf course.
It seems to me sometimes that all beauty is dying. Which makes me hope that perhaps it isn't
dead but only sleeping. And that makes me think of Sleeping Beauty and wonder if she, Beauty
that is, might not be a metaphor for what is happening to the world at large: perfect Beauty born,
Beauty cursed with death, Beauty dying - but with the magical hope of being reawakened, maybe
by love.
The result of all this is Beauty, a novel of the human spirit, a book-length faery tale, a
meditation on various questions of religion - or maybe just a prayer...."
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