Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > The Sleeper and the Spindle

Final review, posted at www.FantasyLiterature.com:

Neil Gaiman took one of his twisted, rather creepy fairy tale stories and turned it into a 66 page picture book with wonderfully whimsical and detailed illustrations by Chris Riddell (who also did the amazing illustrations in the illustrated version of Neverwhere).



I went out on a limb recommending this to Kelly (and the Book Boar) for her fairy tale retellings project when I was only halfway done with this, but I'm relieved to say I still liked it when I finally finished it last night.

A queen is (reluctantly) about to get married, but when a sleeping sickness spreads through a neighboring kingdom and threatens hers, she sets aside her plans, puts on her mail shirt and sword, and heads off with her dwarf friends to take care of the problem herself. There’s a fascinating, gradual reveal of who the queen actually is, and Gaiman deftly interweaves details about how her past experiences inform her present decisions.

Occasionally it seems like Gaiman is pandering just a bit to readers:

She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would still be married, even if he was but a prince and she a queen, and she chucked him beneath his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled.

It feels as if he’s trying to display how much he supports female empowerment, which is a great thing except when it gets in the way of the actual story. And I can't say I'm all that sympathetic to the queen's feeling that, because she's getting married and ruling a kingdom for the rest of her life, she has "no choices" and "the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable." Seriously?

But there are some really nice touches to the story--the queen's decisive action when she comes up to the Sleeping Beauty castle, surrounded by deadly thorns that have killed many adventurous men, had me thinking, why didn't any of the guys ever think of doing that? A suitably creepy note is added when it develops that the people struck by the sleeping sickness do more than just sleep. And the detailed pen-and-ink illustrations with touches of gold really made the story. I loved the skull motif, which subtly changes at the end.



This story may not be amazingly unique--there are a lot of dark fairy tale retellings out there--but between Gaiman's fantastic use of words and imagery, and Riddell's gorgeous illustrations, this is a pretty easy 4 star book for me.