Review: The Rose and the Beast

What do fairy tales and sci-fi have in common?

Well, there are plenty of ways to answer this (some might even argue that the latter is merely a new brand of the former), but the one I was thinking of was that both genres have incredible capacity for innovation and great stories while, simultaneously, having ample room for laxity and mediocrity. Thankfully, Francesca Lia Block's The Rose and the Beast falls into the former category, making it one of the more delightfully rich books I've undertaken this summer.

Genre: this one's hard to place formally, but I would say young adult fiction (anthology)

Plot: Block has taken 9 classic fairy tales and retold them, but in a way that's both timeless and fresh. Sometimes the stories are obviously modern, but sometimes they're just told with a more contemporary spirit. Sometimes the endings are a little different, sometimes it's the emotional depth that has changed more than the plot. Most of them are set in L.A., which seemed a little bizarre at first but actually makes plenty of sense when you think about it.

Structure: Each story is self-contained, and they vary in length. One of my favorite elements of this work was that Block deliberately kept herself to one-word titles, which sometimes obscured the tale they were trying to tell, but sometimes added an extra layer of depth to it. Overall it was a marvelously thoughtful book, and the precise care she took with each word was very apparent.

Execution: I could write essays about Block's prose. It's so lyrical as to be almost poetic, but at the same time, it has a weight that poetry sometimes just doesn't. Poetry has glamour and flash, but sometimes the meaning is much more hollow. But with Block's prose, you have all the polished care of a poet combined with the hearty meat of fiction. Everything sparkles, yet nothing is said without meaning to it. In short, exactly the right way to write this book.

I have to pause to comment about her heroines, too. Like fantasy, it's all too common for fairy-tale revisionists to make the main characters from the same mold as Xena, Warrior Princess, which in turns makes them dull and forgettable. In these stories, the girls were not this unapproachable warrior women. They were fragile, passionate, humble, talented, beautiful, strong, violated, broken...as different from one another as the stories they sprang from.

Theme: Fairy tales (snow white, thumbelina, cinderella, sleeping beauty, little red riding hood, rose white and rose red, bluebeard, beauty and the beast, the ice queen), Los Angeles, love in all its many-splendor'd forms.

Read this if you appreciate the work of poetry but not the poem itself.

5 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Blood Vampires (another fantasy anthology)
Psyche in a Dress (similar blend of poetry/prose and mythology)
Ruby (a "modern day adult fairy tale")

A full list of her work is available here.

If you liked this, you might also like:
- Again, I have to run to the fairy-tale revisionist masters, Jane Yolen and Donna Jo Napoli
- T. S. Elliot's The Wasteland
- George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind