Spindle's End

In a country where magic collects as dust on every surface and having a fairy on hand is always helpful, the king and queen announce the long awaited birth of their first child, a girl. Inviting one person from every village in the country to the name-day and giving their daughter twenty-one fairy godparents, seems like a good plan. Katriona, a fairy in training, is selected as the representative for her small village in the Gig and gets far more than she bargains for when the evil fairy, Pernicia, curses the baby princess with death by pricking her hand on a spindle and Katriona ends up abducting the princess to keep her safe. Raised by two fairies, Rosie has no notion that she is the cursed princess, but dark magic is persistent and show more as Rosie's twenty-first birthday approaches the curse looms with a threat that could tear the entire country apart.

A rich retelling of Sleeping Beauty, Robin McKinley creates a small group of characters that bring a simple tale to life. The world she creates is delightful, with the tendency for magic to crop up anywhere and fairies who are just like any other trades person. What I particularly enjoy is that Rosie is far from the image of perfection one would expect of a princess, especially one given gifts by fairies, and she is instead flawed and real. The only small issue I had was that there would occasionally be leaps in the plot or the introduction of a character without any real notice and I would attempt to spend time attempting to figure out if I'd missed something. Otherwise, a beautiful fairy retelling with a happy ending that will leave you smiling after you turn the last page. show less

(Review originally posted on my blog: http://awordsworth.blogspot.com/2011/06/spindles-end.html)

Spindle's End is a revisiting of 'Sleeping Beauty', but with twist upon twist upon twist. At some point, I decided it left 'Sleeping Beauty' behind and just went on its own merry little journey. I loved it. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Katriona and her aunt Aunt, Rosie - the poor little cursed princess (aka: the Sleeping Beauty) - grows up in a magic-sprinkled environment as an ordinary girl. Well, as ordinary as a girl can be who talks to animals and lives with two fairies. I don't want to give too much about the story itself, because the journey is much of the fun of the reading. The way everything plays out, and turns out, and develops? show more Amazing.

At times I got a little confused, feeling as if I needed to consciously hold on to the story and follow it through a forest. But, where this would annoy me in most cases, it did not here - probably because the world the story is set in, and in part the story itself, is that sort of complex, convoluted, sometimes-up-is-down way. The characters are all delightfully drawn and some left mysterious. I loved Narl - he reminded me of a couple guys I've known, and he was a nice surprise in the middle of everything. The animals are just as much involved in the story as the humans, and they are written convincingly and enchantingly. Basically, this is just another of McKinley's amazing works, and one that I really feel like you must read for yourself. show less

In this retelling of Sleeping Beauty, McKinley has re-imagined a familiar world and provided her own deft twists. Katriona is but a girl when she is selected to be her village's representative at the long-awaited naming ceremony for the new princess. The ceremony goes awry when a wicked fairy arrives, cursing the baby princess to death by her 21st birthday. In a whirlwind of events, Katriona is the one who grabs the baby and makes a run for safety. With the help of animals along the long journey, she and the infant survive. In her remote village, she and her Aunt raise the princess as a very normal sort of girl named Rosie... a girl who happens to have a knack for talking with animals. The threat of attack is always looming, and as her show more 21st birthday draws near, a confrontation is inevitable.

I really wanted to love this book. I love Sleeping Beauty. I have fond memories of McKinley's books from when I was a preteen. Even though the magic of the world comes across well, this is a book where almost nothing happens until the end. The first 200 pages are almost all filler and tales of the princess as she grows up. At the end when magic is in full force, things became confusing, especially as a wide cast of animals took over. As much as I liked the setting and the twists in a familiar tale, the book was incredibly uneven for me and I had to force myself to finish. show less

Another wonderful fairy tale adaptation, this time of Sleeping Beauty. I love this book - I probably liked fairy tales when I was a kid, but now the kind of story where the princess sits (or lays, as the case may be) around waiting for the prince to rescue her don't appeal to me. This is a much more active story, with the princess taking part in her own defense. The animal characters are fantastic - the different personalities they have are so appropriate to the species. And as always with McKinley's books, the description is incredible, with so much detail that the world seems to come alive.

Description: All the creatures of the forest knew the infant was special. She was the princess, spirited away from the evil fairy Pernicia on her name day. But the curse was cast: Sometime in the future Rosie would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a poisoned sleep from which no one could rouse her.

Katriona, the young fairy who whisked Rosie away as an infant, and her aunt raise the princess as if she's their own in order to protect her. No other human, not even Rosie herself, knows her true identity. But Pernicia is looking for Rosie, and her powers are strong. She is so intent on revenge that even the fairies and animals who love Rosie may not be able to save her.

Thoughts: I really enjoyed how McKinley show more turned "The Sleeping Beauty" on it's ear. And I liked most of the characters, although several could have used more fleshing out. Ultimately, however, this story was way to muddled for my tastes. The pacing was strange: nothing really happened at all for long stretches and then there would be a flurry of action which quickly subsided back into nothing. And the shift in narrative focus, from Katriona to Rosie very abruptly, was off-putting.

But I think it was mostly the sense that the story wasn't completely thought out that made this so underwhelming for me. It felt like McKinley knew the highlights she wanted to hit but had trouble navigating from point to point and therefore ended up with a lot of pointless meandering and, towards the end, some writing that came accross as bad stream of consciousness that was trying to pass as deep, important philosophical thought.

One of the worst passages: "Rosie couldn't decide if it was more as if an invisible door opened and let them out, or whether they merely formed themselves out of nothing. Whatever they were, they made you sick to look at them; not sick because of their horribleness, but sick like a person who doesn't like heights looking down a very long way. Looking at them made you dizzy and gave you a headache, and you suddenly felt you no longer knew which way was up and which down, and you wanted something to hold on to, except there wasn't anything to hold on to, except each other, and that wasn't any good because all the rest felt exactly the same."

That is the clearest description given of some phantom thingies that pop up and are then vanquished by... the cat. One second they aren't there, then they are, and then they are gone again. What?

This was the first book by McKinley that I've read. It was a SantaThing gift. I have had some of McKinley's other books on my TBR list but I'm not so sure I'm going to rush out to acquire them after this one.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/130721#3194632 show less

Reading this book was a long and arduous journey. I really could not express how emotionally exhausted I was after reading just twenty pages at a time, which was about all I could do. This was my first McKinley book, so I do not know if all of her books read like this one. If they don't, it was a mistake to start with this one; if they do, then I am not sure I will be able to read more of them.

My biggest complaint is the writing style (which is one I despise, but most people somehow equate to "amazing writing") because it drowns out what had potential, despite some flaws. It reads in a meandering, lost kind of way, like a grandmother relaying a bedtime story to her grandchildren, only the grandmother is very old and forgetful, so she show more talks slowly and retraces her steps often to add unimportant details to make it more engrossing and substantive, then returns to the main story.

I don't understand why any author chooses to write things in this trying-too-hard manner because it is so affected, tiresome, overly complicated, and emotionally draining. Black paragraphs of endless text for pages and pages with dozens of extra words every other paragraph that repeat feelings, situations, painfully exacted points, explanations, or that simply list dozens of animal types... cows and chickens and horses and rabbits and dogs and squirrels and foxes and sheep and mice and... Ugh, I wanted to scream on more than one occasion, "I GET IT, THERE ARE LOTS OF ANIMALS AND THEY ALL THINK ROSIE IS AMAZING AND WANT TO TALK TO HER. MUST WE LIST EVERY ANIMAL IN THE VILLAGE AND SURROUNDING FOREST EVERY TWENTY PAGES? SHEESH!" Even Rosie's given name is a list of dozens of words--I was so annoyed by this! It's not charming or quaint, it's obnoxious.

To make matters worse, the overabundance of words was often arranged oddly in the very long sentences, with an overuse of commas where they weren't necessary and a lack of them where they would have helped with clarification. This was likely the author trying to sound old-fashioned when in fact it comes off as if she cannot construct a grammatically correct, understandable sentence. Because of this, I stumbled over sections constantly and had to reread them over and over to understand.

The lack of dialog (which I felt made sense with the intent of the book coming off like a bedtime story and using it only when necessary) and the numerous characters did not bother me.

Other complaints I've seen are: all the woman (and men and even the animals) are Mary Sues, they all have magical powers, they have no flaws, everyone is their friend and wants to help them or even give their life for them, and everything will always work out for them, including finding the right man. Well, what do you expect? This is a FAIRY TALE, and a fairy tale that takes after Disney, not the Grimm brothers, at that. You don't read a book like this expecting ugly, flawed characters who make bad decisions and have no friends.

Some people really like that Rosie is a "different" princess who doesn't like long hair and all the girlie things a princesses "should" like, which I guess does make this a little unusual where fairy tales go and is supposedly the thing that most shields her from Pernicia, but it really had no effect on me because it was so contrived.

Where Pernicia and the curse is concerned, I have a lot of problems with all of this. For one, the fact that Pernicia couldn't find Rosie for "one-and-twenty" (I will be so glad when I never see that phrase again!) years because she centered her spell over looking for superficial things (like whether the child simply acts like a princess and does princessly things) made me think she is really kind of unintelligent and limited as far as villains go. Even the final confrontation with her was very anticlimactic and she is finished off (twice!)... by a large bird and never actually does anything but put people to sleep. All we heard about was how threatening and clever Pernicia is, whereas the only impression I got was that she puts on a good show, but has no substance. This may be due to the fact that we never find out WHY Pernicia is so angry and what happened all those years ago, only that a queen at the time "wronged" her. I kept waiting for someone to tell me exactly HOW she had been wronged, but it never came, that I can remember. Sooo... someone wronged her scores of years ago so she waited until another female princess was born (which is coincidentally exceedingly rare!) in order to exact her revenge on long-dead people? I DON'T GET IT. How are the citizens living now responsible for Pernicia's hurt back then? And, since we don't even know HOW she was hurt, we can't even determine if holding a grudge that long and taking it out on entirely different people might even be understandable on some level. Overall, I have still more problems with almost all the mechanics of the curse itself, their trading places, and other things like that, but this review is long enough.

Somewhere along the way, somehow, I managed to develop an interest in seeing how it ends, so I pushed through it when normally I would have abandoned it about 40 pages in (or sooner), but ultimately its potential is wasted and I was disappointed and not at all glad that I worked so hard to actually finish reading it. This book left me with no desire to read it again any time soon (if ever) or, for that matter, to try to read anything else of McKinley's, at least for a while so I can recover. I'll give her another chance... eventually. show less

The world-building here was amazing, as it seems to be in every McKinley novel I have read. In particular, I liked the idea of going into how the effects of a change in spindle design (as opposed to destroying all the spinning wheels in the kingdom) changed the artistry and economy throughout the kingdom, which made the whole thing seem more realistic:

“Everyone all over the country went home after hearing the heralds’ announcement, and at once knocked the pointed ends off their spindles and threw them on the fire, or bashed them with mallets and gave them to their local smiths who threw them on the hotter smithy fires; and then they looked sadly at the mutilated spindles. Weavers temporarily found their thread supplies short, while show more spinners adapted to shorter and thicker spindles. Later on spinners and tool makers began to develop new spindles and new ways to cast their thread on and off them; over time, in a mixture of anger and fear and resentment, and a fuzzy but sincere desire to show their support for the royal family, a new art form was born: spindle ends.

“At first these were only rough shapings of the beheaded ends, merely to make them look less wrong…Spindles and spindle ends became interesting in their own right; people argued as passionately over which woods made the best spindle ends as they did over which made the best bows and hafts.

“Over more time – and obstinacy – the new spindle ends became…the way things were: and the offhand whittling of them became both elaborate and beautiful…Spinners grew much more organised about finishing off, so that their spindle ends were free for display when not in active use; the broad blunt ends of wheel spindles, in particular, were intricately carved.

“Eventually, in later generations, a hand-carved spindle end was a favourite wedding gift…and especially fine examples of the spindle-carving art were highly prized heirlooms…In neighboring countries, people who saw the spindle ends…adapted their own spinning wheels so that they too could use their neighbors’ beautiful spindle ends, and spindle ends became one of this country’s most prized exports.” (Pages 77-78).

I also enjoyed the idea of the folklore surrounding smitheries, and the practical effects of it:

“There was another more intriguing bit of folklore that said that truth was truth in a smith’s yard…And there was a tradition of moving deadlocked legal struggles to a smith’s yard for the truth to be discovered that way; but this was not at all popular with the smith whose yard it was, since legal truths have a way of emerging with excruciating slowness.” (Page 113).

I also think Woodwold should be considered more of a character than a house, which would explain it using magic to protect the people inside of it as best it could, and also how Rosie could hear it. I know quite a few people here have complained that “magic A is not magic A” (TV Tropes warning if you go to look this up) and how that affected their willingness to suspend belief, but I saw the magic as more of a capricious character itself and so I didn’t have as big of an issue with it. That said, I’m not sure what to make of Pernicia’s castle; that whole part did seem out of character for the magic. Unless Pernicia’s magic was of a completely different sort than the general magic associated with the country, and this was a way of showing it.

I loved the whole world McKinley created, and how she gave enough detail for it to ring true. I also enjoyed the Damar Easter eggs that showed up later in the story: “She [Rosie] thought of her favourite stories…many of the tales of Damar against the North, especially of Harimad-sol at the Madamar gate, and the holding of the way at Ullen.” (Page 284).

I am a cat-lover, so I also appreciated this:

“Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic – which was what all magic was – it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day, and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred.” (Pages 106-107).

One other fun quote: “Rocks were pretty reliably rocks, except of course when they were something else that had been turned into rocks.” (Page 5). show less