"Five Magic Spindles" review
Overview
Title: Five Magic Spindles
Editor: Anne Elisabeth Stengl
Subgenre: Fairy tale retellings
2021 Bingo squares: Short stories (hm) (by word count these are 5 novellas but I’m gonna stretch it)
Recommend: YES but maybe skip the 2nd one
Stars: 5/5 (but maybe skip the 2nd one)
Review
Five Magic Spindles is a collection of five retellings of Sleeping Beauty. They range from fairly traditional (the second one, extremely skippable) to barely recognizable as a Sleeping Beauty retelling (the first one) to somewhere in between (the rest). Sleeping Beauty is a hard fairy tale to do a good retelling of because:
- The original story is literally romanticizing nonconsensual touching (or even rape, depending on which “original story” we’re talking about);
- The protagonist of the original story completely lacks agency in her own story;
- When I say she lacks agency, not only is the primary plot point her being asleep, but prior to that, her entire personality was determined at birth by fairies dictating her personality traits;
- Honestly, the original story is quite boring what with all the fairies bestowing all the “blessings” and the waiting for the inevitable curse and such; and
- There’s basically no meaningful character interaction whatsoever in the original story. Like, the prince and princess don’t interact. The princess is lonely her entire life before she falls asleep. The kingdom falls into ruin for 100 years. The fairy who performs the curse is supposed to be an outcast. Where are the bonds of friendship or enmity? Who experiences character development?
So as we can see, to rescue all of the failures of this quite stupid fairy tale into a compelling story is a monumental task. (This anthology is composed of the winning entries of a contest, and you can read some commentary by the author about common failures by entries that were not selected.) But perhaps that’s why (other than the one that’s a very faithful retelling) these retellings ended up so incredibly goddamn cool!
I’m going to give a mini-review of each retelling and three ratings. A story rating - how does this story stand on its own, regardless of the fact that it’s a Sleeping Beauty retelling? A retelling rating - how well does it fit into this anthology as a retelling of Sleeping Beauty? And an agency rating - I think the biggest problem with the original fairy tale is that none of the characters (except maybe the fairy casting the original curse) has any agency at all, at any point in time. So, how well does this retelling fix this glaring problem?
The Man on the Buckskin Horse
Story rating: 3/5
Retelling rating: 5/5
Agency of characters rating: 4/5
This one’s actually a straight-up historical fiction western, without a single fantastical element. As far as stories go, it’s not all that exciting, but when it comes to Sleeping Beauty retellings - wow! What a creative take on the story! The “princess” still has zero agency and remains a plot device (though she’s not taken advantage of in any way), but the protagonist is the town gossip, so the princess’s agency is rather immaterial to the story.
Guardian of our Beauty
Story rating: 2/5
Retelling rating: 3/5
Agency of characters rating: 2/5
Relocating your European fairy tale outside of Europe does not automatically make it interesting. Spending half the story talking about how good a person the princess was before she fell asleep does not make the princess a more compelling character, especially if she has no other personality traits. And making the princess a semi-lucid ghost who knows she has to lure a prince to kiss her awake or otherwise fall into a permanent dream state does not really turn it into a consensual act. I guess it’s better than the alternative because the prince thinks it’s consensual but there’s still a lot of coercion here and that’s really not good.
It’s cool to include a faithful retelling just to have a comparison for HOW MUCH THE ORIGINAL STORY SUCKS so to be honest I’m glad this one was in here but I wish the faithful retelling had been, like, 1/4 the length of the others instead of just as long. If I weren’t obligated to read the entire anthology for /r/fantasy bingo I would have just skipped this one.
Seriously, the original Sleeping Beauty is a really bad story.
The Ghost of Briardale
Story rating: 5/5
Retelling rating: 5/5
Agency of characters rating: 5/5
This is hands down the best Sleeping Beauty retelling I’ve ever read, and, yes, I’m including A Spindle Splintered (okay maybe it’s not better than that one but they’re so different that it’s not comparable don’t make me pick). I don’t want to tell you anything about what happens, because we don’t really find out what’s going on for a few chapters, but, oh my god, what a STORY! This one alone makes the entire anthology worth buying or borrowing, and if you read only this one that’s fine (though the last one is also great).
Spindle Cursed
Story rating: 3/5
Retelling rating: 4/5
Agency of characters rating: 5/5
This one is cute! It’s like half a story, half a commentary on what the nature of true love could possibly be. The prince and princess are able to talk to each other by a magical link when the prince falls asleep, so he has time to court her, and she has limited awareness of the outside world. The fairy who turned the curse into a not-as-bad curse features as a character, and she’s super fun. The low story rating is because it dragged a bit at the start; I think it would have benefitted from being about 10-15% shorter, but it seemed like all the stories were all expected to be very close to a certain word count.
Out of the Tomb
Story rating: 4.5/5
Retelling rating: 5/5
Agency of characters rating: 4.5/5
Not as good as The Ghost of Briardale but that’s really not saying much at all; this retelling was EXCELLENT. Tanza is a tomb raider and accidentally wakes up the prince who’s been asleep in a stasis field for the past hundred years, recovering from a deadly spindle attack. (Yeah, in this story spindles are evil weapons that torture their victims prior to killing them. Nothing to do with thread.) Whoopsies! She’s pretty disappointed because a long-lost prince isn’t the lucrative haul she expected. And did I mention this happens on an alien planet and is science fiction? This one is also a hell of a lot of fun.
