Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper (1992, Paperback, Reprint)

I love novelized fairy tales for adults, so when I found this one I was overjoyed. This book is about Sleeping Beauty - or is it? A young girl, called Beauty, lives in Westfaire in 1347. She is half-fairy and embarks on a journey on her sixteenth birthday. To avoid the fulfillment of the curse, her half-sister (born on the wrong side of the blanket of course) takes her place in the eternal sleep. Per the normal story, all people and animals in the castle fall asleep too.

Beauty escapes one fate, but stumbles into another entirely different one. She is seen by a crew from the future come to film the ending of magic. She is taken to the future by them and finally realizes her fairy blood by escaping back to the past using tools her fairy mother left her but not before she experinces a violent rape.

Of course there is the fairy godmother in the tale who helps Beauty out at times.

Beauty, from having visited the future realizes that everything on earth must be placed in Westfaire to be safe to awaken in the future when mankind has finished it's destruction.

Along the way, she walks into many well known fairy tales, once as Cinderella, mother of Snow White and then as the fairy godmother herself. She cannot escape the density she was to fulfill.

Throughout the book her love for a commoner stands firm. Will their time together be too short? Will Beauty save all the wonders of the world? Read this very entertaining and poignant novel. I'd give this book a ten if it was allowed. It has become one of my favorite read over and over books.

I love all of Tepper's books, even those under other names she has used in the past. Her writing incorporates civil and human rights, particularly for women, and environmental consciousness so needed in these sadly regressive times. She does not avoid being "politically uncorrect" if it would compromise the story. I hope she never stops writing her fascinating and socially pertinent novels.