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Summary
Summary
In a beautiful collaboration, New York Times bestselling and Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning author Neil Gaiman and Kate Greenaway-winning illustrator Chris Riddell have created a thrillingly reimagined fairy tale, "told in a way only Gaiman can" and featuring "stunning metallic artwork" (GeekInsider.com).
The result is a beautiful and coveted edition of The Sleeper and the Spindle that the Guardian calls "a refreshing, much-needed twist on a classic story."
In this captivating and darkly funny tale, Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell have twisted together the familiar and the new as well as the beautiful and the wicked to tell a brilliant version of Snow White's (sort of) and Sleeping Beauty's (almost) stories.
This story was originally published (without illustrations) in Rags & Bones (Little, Brown, 2013). This is the first time it is being published as an illustrated, stand-alone edition, and the book is a beautiful work of art.
Author Notes
Neil Gaiman was born in Portchester, England on November 10, 1960. He worked as a journalist and freelance writer for a time, before deciding to try his hand at comic books. Some of his work has appeared in publications such as Time Out, The Sunday Times, Punch, and The Observer. His first comic endeavor was the graphic novel series The Sandman. The series has won every major industry award including nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, three Harvey Awards, and the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short story, making it the first comic ever to win a literary award.
He writes both children and adult books. His adult books include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which won a British National Book Awards, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel for 2014; Stardust, which won the Mythopoeic Award as best novel for adults in 1999; American Gods, which won the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX, and Locus awards; Anansi Boys; Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances; and The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, which is a New York Times Bestseller. His children's books include The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish; Coraline, which won the Elizabeth Burr/Worzalla, the BSFA, the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Bram Stoker awards; The Wolves in the Walls; Odd and the Frost Giants; The Graveyard Book, which won the Newbery Award in 2009 and The Sandman: Overture which won the 2016 Hugo Awards Best Graphic Story.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this twist on a fairy tale, the audiobook uses a full cast to great effect. A tough, no-nonsense queen, who may or may not be Snow White, hears about a princess who was placed under a sleeping spell. The magic appears to be spreading, plunging citizens of nearby villages into sleep, so the queen sets out with three dwarf friends to awaken the princess and break the spell before it reaches her kingdom. Having many different voices greatly helps listeners suspend disbelief. Julian Rhind-Tutt has a wry tone with a smart English accent for the narrator. The royal characters sound upper-class British, workers in the pub sound vaguely Cockney, but the dwarves (played by Peter Forbes, John Sessions, and Michael Maloney) are all voiced in glorious Scottish accents. Music and intricate sound effects (such as the faint sounds of maggots chomping nearby) immerse listeners in the realm of the cursed kingdom. This twisted take on a classic fairy tale is brought to life with sound. Ages 13-up. A Harper hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
FAIRY TALE RETELLINGS: Climb up a pile of these revamped, remixed and rehabilitated classics and we reach high enough to wake the giant. And yet, no matter how much we empower the princess, humanize the witch and emasculate the prince, or how earnestly we whack and whittle these tales to reflect us, we seem only to make the original tales stronger. At first glance, a new version of "Vasilisa the Beautiful" seems to stand apart from the glut of retellings by choosing not to revise at all. Anthea Bell's text faithfully recounts the Russian fairy tale about a young girl left with a magical doll by her dying mother, who vows that the doll will look after her in difficult times. Vasilisa's father remarries a cruel woman who sends her stepdaughter on an errand to the witch Baba Yaga, expecting her never to return. With the help of her magical doll, Vasilisa passes Baba Yaga's tests and earns the twin totems of Ever After: revenge on her tormentors and a rich, handsome prince. Bell and the illustrator, Anna Morgunova, might believe "Vasilisa the Beautiful" stands the test of time, but they have their work cut out. First, there's that title. In an era when even Disney must thaw frozen, passive princesses, Vasilisa is blond, meek and barely lifts a finger. Even with subtle additions emphasizing her courage, it's the doll that's the hero, whisking through Baba Yaga's tasks, keeping her owner safe, and ensuring she finds her prince. (How Vasilisa wins him is itself sticky - he marries her because she's pretty and a good seamstress. Angela Carter would have picked his bones clean.) But Morgunova's illustrations hint at a rich inner life beneath the surface. With each image set askew, often superimposed against a starry sky, the effect is to emphasize all the characters' powerlessness in Baba Yaga's great forest. Vasilisa is always falling, reeling or sprawling; birds and fish dwarf humans in their size; and even Baba Yaga herself never fully appears, drawn only as feathers and fog, as if she's half Mother Earth and half Zen harpy. The art, so timeless and raw, offers a charged dream-life that suggests the primal nerve Vasilisa's story strikes in Morgunova is far stronger than the lure of revisionism. In contrast, Neil Gaiman's "The Sleeper and the Spindle," intended for a young adult audience, is nothing but revision. Here, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are contemporaries, with the latter postponing her marriage to rescue the slumbering princess from a wicked fairy. The iconography is familiar - sidekick dwarves, thorn-covered castle, a bitter old witch - but Gaiman's mash-up is unabashedly feminist. The prince sulks over the delayed wedding, while Snow White dons chain mail and rides out to save the day. The gnarled, ugly witch is certainly more than she seems. And the princely kiss that wakes a sleeping beauty doesn't involve a prince at all. Plenty of authors have tried such tactics, only to succumb to another hazard of retelling - the niggling feeling that when all is said and done, what we're reading is souped-up fan fiction. But Gaiman knows fairy tales in his bones, and his work is so sonically tuned that it breathes on its own from the first line ("It was the closest kingdom to the queen's, as the crow flies, but not even the crows flew it"). What's most remarkable about "The Sleeper and the Spindle," besides its string of expert twists, is how it feels told rather than written. Time is elusive, magic is unexplained, personal details ignored ("Names are in short supply in this telling," the narrator affirms). Adding to the wonder are Chris Riddell's dazzling illustrations, black-and-white with flashes of gold, so detailed in their dark imagination that, at times, Gaiman's story seems less a fairy tale and more a bad, beautiful dream. Read this to a child alongside another Grimms tale and he will no doubt think this is the older story. In "The Most Wonderful Thing in the World," Vivian French grapples with a third hazard of fairy tale retellings: fairy tale structure itself. Yearning royals seeking the most wonderful thing in the world is its own subgenre of folklore, with the seekers bounding to the ends of the earth only to find that what they've been hunting was waiting at home all along. These stories skew very young, for a child with even the slightest nose for fairy tales can't help seeing the ending in the setup. Yet, like Bell and Morgunova, French bets on a traditional telling of the tale, even if tweeness hangs over it like a Damoclean sword. Lucia is an overprotected princess, but when the king and queen realize she will one day lead their kingdom, they conclude she will need a husband (those who protest this conclusion won't find sympathy here). They consult the wisest man in the kingdom, who advises them to "find the young man who can show you the most wonderful thing in the world." While the royal couple entertain would-be suitors, Lucia escapes the palace and asks Salvatore, the wise man's son, to show her the city. The king and queen come up short; Lucia and Salvatore find love, and Salvatore offers Lucia as the answer to the riddle and wins her hand. It's as rarefied as it sounds, but French is a skilled storyteller, and with the help of Angela Barrett's illustrations invoking steampunk, Edwardian style and a gilded Venice, she reminds us how fresh a fairy tale can feel in the right hands. The king and queen's quest slyly moves beyond the mundane - a hundred roses, a snowwhite horse - to shimmering fantasies: an aquatic car, a piece of frozen sky, a blue cheetah whose fur reflects a bat-filled sky. In her first trip out of the palace, Lucia explores not a fusty medieval kingdom, but a world of "glittering arcades" and "velvet-curtained mansions," stirring the thought that the most wonderful thing in the world might indeed be a European city free of tourists. It's so alluring a tapestry that when the final revelation takes place in a quiet fairy-tale wood, we feel palpable relief. Perhaps our quest to reinvigorate classic stories is no different from the king and queen's. Again and again, we stray in search of better fortune, only to find our way back home. SOMAN CHAINANI is the author of the School for Good and Evil trilogy.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-On the eve of her wedding, a beautiful queen learns from three dwarf friends that peril has befallen a kingdom in the east. A young princess lies asleep in the castle's tower while a sleeping fog placed by an evil enchantress is rapidly seeping west. Having experienced this sleeping curse herself, the queen quickly exchanges her wedding gown for chain mail and a sword and follows the dwarfs into underground tunnels, past cobweb-covered villages, and through a thorny forest. As the sun sets, Good has conquered Evil and the queen has learned her own lesson: a girl always has choices. And with that knowledge, she takes the lead and continues her journey-heading east. This clever reinvention of a classic fairy tale and the double-take twist on the traditional princess-in-peril story line is sure to put a mischievous grin on listeners' faces. The exceptionally talented full-cast ensemble, which includes Julian Rhind-Tutt, Lara Pulver, and Niamh Walsh, paired with eerie music and sound effects like clopping hooves and crackling fire, breathes life into an already stellar tale. VERDICT A magical, mysterious must-have for young tweens and anyone who's young at heart. ["This highly recommended visually stunning twist on two classic fairytales will be well-received by fans of graphic novels and fantasy stories": SLJ 8/15 starred review of the Harper book.]-Cheryl Preisendorfer, Twinsburg City Schools, OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.