Beauty uses the magic boots she had made to work her way back to her own time, only to find the Black Death has struck the area in her absence.

She marries Ned and gives birth to a girl, but Beauty sees Jaybee in the infant Elly's eyes and feels revulsion toward the baby.

She rediscovers Giles, meets her now-grown daughter, rescues her adolescent granddaughter, encounters her enchanted great-grandson, and takes vengeance on Jaybee.

[1] Robert Collins, writing in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, characterizes the novel as ecofeminism, with Beauty as an icon of the green movement.

"Tepper weaves multiple fairy tale narratives into the plot: Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, The Frog Prince[4] and Tam Lin.

The idealistic nature of fairy tales is contrasted with the realistic form of love that Beauty and Giles find in their old age.

[6] Lauren Lacey says of Tepper's Beauty: "her focus on bringing the tales together rather than on encouraging the proliferation of their possibilities leads to a damaging sense of narrative closure.

"[4] A review in The Kingston Whig-Standard says Tepper "takes the two-dimensional, symbolic characters of a fairy tale and makes them real by giving both them and their stories depth and historical detail.

"[7] Kirkus Reviews is generally negative, saying "Tepper can't decide whether to warn against a gathering spiritual darkness, lament the collapse of an aesthetic ideal, or thunder against global eco-disaster.