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About 100 pages into Beauty I wasn't sure whether I was really going to like the book, as it kept moving from subject to subject without staying long enough with each one to make it work. About 200 pages in, I was convinced the author had far too many ideas for her own good, and no idea of how to weave them together into a cohesive story. Despite my misgivings, though, I stuck with the book, and I'm glad I did, because the second half more than made up for the flaws of the first. I ended up enjoying the hell out of Beauty, so much so that I considered giving it five stars. Not bad for a book which initially struck me as trying too hard and failing.

So what is Beauty about? It's hard to summarise the story as it is so terribly convoluted, but in a nutshell, it's about a fourteenth-century princess (half human, half fairy) named Beauty who escapes a terrible, fairy-tale-like fate and magically ends up in the twenty-first century, which is a distinctly unpleasant place bereft of all beauty. From this dystopian future she makes her way back to a very recognisable twentieth century which clearly carries the germs of the wave of destruction which is about to follow, and from there the story weaves in and out of different ages and worlds (reality, Faerie, even Hell) where Beauty gets to deal with love, rape and rejection, among many other things. She also discovers that she carries something important within her, something essential to the survival of Things Which Matter. And so the reader is taken on a rollercoaster ride through time and space, which is further enlivened by the many well-known fairy-tale characters Beauty meets on her way. I don't want to give away too much here, but Beauty somehow ends up giving birth to Cinderella and also counts Sleeping Beauty and the Frog Prince among her descendants. These well-known characters are among the most inspired elements of the book, mainly because they are so different from the way they are portrayed elsewhere. Take Cinderella, for instance. In Tepper's vision, she is not the sweet and innocent girl of Perrault's tale, but rather an outrageous slut who must have her prince because she can't wait to shag his brains out. For her part, Sleeping Beauty, while insanely beautiful, is also insanely stupid, and as for the seven dwarfs who guard her while she is asleep, well, let's just say they are not as innocent as Disney made them out to be. I had a ball with Tepper's take on these classic characters, frequently laughing out loud at the way she perverted old tales and wove them into her own story. There is some very clever pastiche going on here, and to me, it just about made the book.

What lets Beauty down somewhat is the didacticism of its tone. Tepper is a fine writer, but she is not very subtle; she makes her points very heavy-handedly, sometimes cringe-inducingly so. In Beauty, she tackles the loss of nature, beauty and magic in an increasingly less romantic world. As a fellow romantic with a yearning for the sublime, I found myself in sympathy with Tepper's message, but I do wish she hadn't forced it down my throat the way she did. I also somewhat objected to the overt feminism of the book, which mainly manifested itself in some truly despicable male characters. Apart from the heavy-handed environmentalism and feminism, though, Beauty is a fine book with some good, honest writing and some truly inspired ideas, mostly in the second half. If you can get over the disjointedness of the first half and the author's tendency to introduce cool ideas without really working them out, you'll find an imaginative and frequently entertaining (albeit depressing) fantasy story with some familiar, refreshingly un-Disney-like characters. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's better than most fantasy books out there, and I have no trouble recommending it to those who like their fairy tales dark and bleak.