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A review by liralen
Beauty by Nancy Ohlin
2.0
Beauty (also published as Mirror, Mirror) is a Snow White retelling: Ana, a young princess, hides her beauty for years in order to avoid angering her beautiful mother; only when Ana is sent away does she believe she can work to be anything other than ugly.
I find fairytale retellings appealing, but I think this one didn't have enough layers for me. Ana is at boarding school for much of the book, but I don't think we ever see her in a class, and almost none of her classmates are developed beyond being pretty girls obsessed with fashion and makeup and the like. Nor are the headmaster's motivations developed, or even Ana's. What does she want, beyond her mother's approval?
Ana does develop, a tiny bit, at the end of the story: she finally sees that her mother will go to any lengths to be the 'fairest of them all'. But beyond that, what? The story just sort of...ends. I want to know why beauty was the be-all and end-all for the queen (and why she felt the need to kill off anyone else who might be attractive...and why this had never come up before...), what the other students want beyond beauty, etc. What was the role of the beauty consultant? What was the end game? The story gets away with ignoring some of this because of its suspend-your-disbelief style, but at the end too many questions remain for me.
I find fairytale retellings appealing, but I think this one didn't have enough layers for me. Ana is at boarding school for much of the book, but I don't think we ever see her in a class, and almost none of her classmates are developed beyond being pretty girls obsessed with fashion and makeup and the like. Nor are the headmaster's motivations developed, or even Ana's. What does she want, beyond her mother's approval?
Ana does develop, a tiny bit, at the end of the story: she finally sees that her mother will go to any lengths to be the 'fairest of them all'. But beyond that, what? The story just sort of...ends. I want to know why beauty was the be-all and end-all for the queen (and why she felt the need to kill off anyone else who might be attractive...and why this had never come up before...), what the other students want beyond beauty, etc. What was the role of the beauty consultant? What was the end game? The story gets away with ignoring some of this because of its suspend-your-disbelief style, but at the end too many questions remain for me.