✨🌹Fairytale Friday🌹✨
A Fairytale with Teeth
This week, we’re visiting a familiar fairy tale through a slightly stranger, more theatrical lens with our first edition copy of Beauty & the Beast, retold and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein. Published in 1989 by E. P. Dutton, this picture book embraces the older, darker bones of the story rather than the softened versions many of us grew up with.
Mordicai Gerstein (1935–2019), an American author, illustrator, and film director best known for his Caldecott Medal-winning The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, approaches the tale as both storyteller and stage designer. His Beast is no gentle hybrid, tusked, horned, feathered, and tailed; he looks like a creature pulled straight from a medieval bestiary. The pen-and-wash illustrations are deliberately stylized, with period-inspired clothing and expressive linework that heighten the book’s slightly uncanny tone.
Narratively, this retelling stays close to early French versions of the tale, particularly the 18th-century tradition in which a single stolen rose sets everything in motion. Beauty’s choice to take her father’s place, her long stay at the castle, her troubling dreams, and her delayed return all unfold with quiet inevitability. This is a fairy tale that trusts its structure and lets the tension build at its own pace.
One of the book’s most striking features is its use of color; each page rests against a different background hue, giving the story a dreamlike rhythm and reinforcing the sense that Beauty is moving through emotional and moral territory as much as physical space.
What’s especially satisfying about this retelling is how it lets the story keep its edge. The Beast is still intimidating, the setting still feels strange and enchanted, and Beauty’s choices carry real weight. It’s a reminder that the best fairy tales aren’t just pretty, they’re a little unsettling, a little romantic, and always about change.
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---Melissa (loving stories that bite), Distinctive Collections Library Assistant
