Reviews tagging 'Animal death'

preface: it is not surprise to anyone who knows me that Neil Gaiman is my favorite author, and so everything he writes ends up giving me some kind of joy. whether that's an absolute blind side or the fact that he is truly a different kind of talent is anyone's guess but it does mean that I will likely be effusively positive about most of his books.

Summary

The Sleeper and the Spindle is a tale of two different princesses, one now a Queen in name and right and another having been forgotten for so long it took her own bad fortune encroaching upon others to get anyone to even attempt to find her again. A duality story about two women who are never definitively named, but are akin to Snow White and Sleeping Beauty regardless of this.

A trio of dwarfs accompany the Queen (Snow White) on her journey and offer a hit of levity and color to an otherwise simple premise: the world is being taken by a sleeping curse and people are still managing to reach out and speak in their dreams, implying something is truly wrong in the mix.

Though neither princess has ever met the other, the Queen is willing to leave her own wedding day for the sake of the country-side and endures a journey through many hazards just to make it to the tower in which Sleeping Beauty is purportedly lying sleeping (yet undying) in her bed.

The Queen didn't seem too keen on getting married in the first place, if one was to guess; a lot of the exposition and personal reflection of her own storied 'chapters' before the journey were akin to going through motions and knowing that some day she would just be a bridge. It wasn't something she openly disparaged but there was an underlying hint of a woman built for adventure even in those early chapters.

The first glimpse we get of anything truly happening in the castle and it's famed tower is an old woman wandering through and, for some reason, making sure everyone seems comfortable. It is meant to be believed that

the woman is the witch, but she is in fact the cursed (non)Sleeping Beauty, as the woman lying in her bed is the witch who

cursed her and her people to steal their youth through a magic spell on a spindle and thread. The curse ties the witch to the (then) young girl and she will be awake and live as long as the witch is alive... making it so that if she kills her so will she too die and, one would assume, all her people.

It has been 70 years and no one had even questioned the validity of the story, just accepting that anyone who tried to enter was being killed by the danger outside of those walls (in the thorns that had grown to protect and that our heroic Queen slashed and burned her way through to uncover the mystery.)

The Queen understood the breadth of the witch the moment she spoke with her, having dealt with her own such situation in her step-mother and the curse put upon her, and leads the old Woman to finally take back her power and fell this witch, regardless of if it means her death or not. She gathered that the people would be freed even if the Old Woman did not survive.

A spindle stab to the heart and the boasting queen is bested and lies merely ashy ooze and nothing more and the people are stood there, baffled at their sudden awakeness, and told to take care of the old Woman because they owe everything to her; the Queen offers no more information on this and leave with her dwarfs.

It's then that the story comes full circle and we get the conclusion of the Queen finally realising her own agency and power and she chooses to go the opposite direction of her own castle, wedding, and destiny and continue on her adventures with her dwarf companions and... do good in the world as much as she can while seeing everything.

Opinion

A short jaunt with art that spoke to me on a visceral level. It was really lovely and though it didn't give itself a lot of time to develop, that was much the point.

The story itself was charming, with enough creepy to feel still decidedly Neil Gaiman while still holding true to the ideas we have in our minds of the original Fairy Tales. He always manages to weave in a little bit of soft macabre with fantastical places and descriptions of otherwise simple things.

The art was charming. Stylized in such a way as to seem almost like a debossed shot from behind of everything going on, still the right side up and everything moving forward, but a peek behind the curtain at what could be. A lovely accompaniment to the overall story.

More of both would have been appreciated, and while it's understood the story has existed in this form for a long time, hope can still be held for an extension.

Content Warnings

More...