Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beauty | 1978 | Robin McKinley | Buy |
| 2 | Rose Daughter | 1997 | Robin McKinley | Buy |
| 3 | Spindle’s End | 2000 | Robin McKinley | Buy |
Robin McKinley’s Folktales series collects her three major fairy tale retellings into one reading sequence. Beauty (1978) was her debut novel, a warm and grounded retelling of Beauty and the Beast that became a beloved classic of young adult fantasy. Nearly twenty years later, she returned to the same story with Rose Daughter (1997), approaching the fairy tale from a completely different angle with more emphasis on magic, gardening, and the slow transformation of the Beast’s world.
Spindle’s End (2000) retells Sleeping Beauty, setting it in a country where magic is common and sometimes inconvenient. The story follows Rosie, a princess raised in disguise by a fairy in a small village, and builds toward the curse and its resolution in McKinley’s characteristically detailed prose. Each of these three novels stands on its own, but together they show how McKinley returned to familiar fairy tales and found something new in them each time.