Beauty and the Beast by Madame Leprince de Beaumont

I share my kindle account with several other people.  And when others order books I quite often get them sent to my kindle because my name is first in the list so it is the default kindle.  Last week I recieved a large number of classic books that were ordered by one of the others on the account.  I usually glance through and delete because I have other books I am working through.  But I was intrigged by the idea of Beauty and the Beast.

I remember spending a lot of Sunday evenings playing cards or other games with Beauty and the Beast or Little Mermaid going on in the background.  (I am not sure why we did this, but it is what my group of high school friends did on Sunday nights.)

The Disney story is fairly close to the original.  In paper the story is less that 50 pages.  So it is a very quick read.

But it is interesting to see the idea of sacrifice played out so clearly in this book.  There not the detailed internal motivation that you would expect from a modern novel, but still there is a clear sense that sacrifice and love were closely aligned in the mind of the author.

One of the great benefits of having an ebook reader is picking up free classics.  The link above to the kindle version is a free copy.  (There are others that people package and charge for, but often they are not any better than the free version.)

If you do not have kindle, try Project Gutenberg, there are a number of good formats, at least one will be readable by all ereaders.

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