I could have specified McKinley’s The Blue Sword or The Hero and the Crown (which I also read and re-read many times in my youth) but I chose Beauty to spotlight here because I am fairly certain it was the first fairy-tale retelling novel I ever read. It opened up to me the idea that stories are malleable, able to be reinterpreted and turned inside out and dressed up in different costumes and sent into different landscapes. You can write a version of Beauty and the Beast in which the Beauty is quite clever but has mousy hair and splotchy skin, and the sisters aren’t nasty and evil, and explore all the layers and corners and secrets that get glossed over in a picture book. I’ve been a fan of fairy-tale retellings ever since!

Edited to add this additional McKinley-related reflection
I have a distinct memory of being at a workshop/lecture for our school’s gifted and talented program that was supposed to be about something like “encouraging genius” or maybe “recognizing genius”. I view the whole thing dubiously from the present day but at the time I was 11 or 12 and really wanted to be “special” so of course I was eager to not to fail be be genius material. The fellow leading the program did various things like having people look at Rorschach-type shapes and having them say what they saw (if you saw static things you didn’t have so much genius, according to him, as if you saw things in motion or active).

Anyways, he also went around asking the kids what their favorite books were. I suspect he was looking for Ullyses or something, but mine was (honestly) The Blue Sword. That was one of the few (thankfully) times in my life I’ve actually been made to feel unworthy for favoring fantasy. Not that he said anything specific I recall, but his reaction made me feel like it was a baffling or silly choice, and unworthy. Not ‘literature’ = not genius.

But I am proud to love fantasy, proud that many of the books on this list are full of fantastical lands and people. Because they are also full of imagination and an enthusiasm for the myriad different directions life can take, and they are nevertheless full of people who struggle to do the right thing and make a difference in the world. And I’m not so much interested in being a genius as I am in telling stories people love and want to read, that entertain them and make their own worlds a little bigger and brighter.