Robin McKinley does a lot of fairy tale retellings, though with Spindle’s End she’s branching out a bit and doing a retelling of something other than Beauty and the Beast (which she’s done at least 3 times). The thing about fairy tale retellings is that either it’s different enough to lose that comforting familiarity, or else it’s not different enough and it’s perfectly predictable. Spindle’s End manages to split that difference perfectly: I never lost track of the fact that I was reading a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, and yet McKinley still kept me guessing literally up through the epilogue.
And through all of this, the book was (unexpectedly) funny as hell.
Y’all know the premise: kingdom is delighted to welcome the daughter of the King, fairy godmothers bestowing blessing, wicked fairy bestowing a pre-industrial-textile-manufacturing-equipment-based curse, princess spirited away to hiding, grows up not knowing her identity, curse to strike on her 18th birthday, etc. All of that happens.
The thing about Sleeping Beauty is that you really can’t tell the whole story from the princess’s perspective - after all, she’s a newborn at the beginning, and newborns generally don’t have that much of an internal monologue. So McKinley’s solution here is to make the protagonist for the first half of the book Katriona, a teenaged fairy who manages to (accidentally) bestow an additional blessing on little Rosie (as they call her), and then is press-ganged into being the one to take and raise the baby in secret, along with her older, more experienced fairy aunt. (Fairies, in this context, are more or less villagers like everyone else, but with some additional magical talents and effects. Sometimes more annoying than useful.)
So we get Katriona’s perspective for the first half of the book, with a gradual transition to Rosie’s perspective as she grows into her teenage years. Katriona’s a great character: warm, befuddled, and in over her head.
Rosie herself is (in the tradition of Robin McKinley protagonists) intelligent, willful, determined, and not particularly pretty. (All the fairy godmothers, in blessing the baby with things like “hair like gold” and “skin like milk”, never thought to bless her with “a pretty face.” Her hair is gorgeous (though she hates the ringlets and keeps it short), and her complexion is very fair (so she burns after about 10 seconds of sun and everyone knows when she’s feeling any strong emotion), but her face is rather plain.
Rosie’s life growing up is delightful to read - McKinley does a truly wonderful job with it. I give her credit for actually working in the woodland-creatures-flocking-around-her in a way that actually makes a degree of sense.
Things change as Rosie approaches her 18th birthday, and finds out her heritage. Katriona and her aunt have been working this entire time to arrange matters so Rosie can evade the curse, but the wicked fairy is powerful, and they know the danger is very real. The back half of the book just crackles with tension in the lead-up to Rosie’s birthday. This was the kind of book that is just exhausting to read, what with the tense muscles and accelerated heart rate and all.
I don’t want to reveal much, but while the expected Handsome Prince does in fact appear, it’s not in a way I expected. And no prince is coming in at the eleventh hour to save the damsel in distress, thank you very much - Rosie is the heroine of this story, and there’s no snoozing-until-molested-awake going on here.
I generally adore Robin McKinley, and this is a book that needs more attention. Highly, highly recommended.
As far as Bingo goes, this works for the retelling square.