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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
hopeful
lighthearted
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is definitely quite a different take on Sleeping Beauty. This book is jam packed with detail and plot.
adventurous
hopeful
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
A gorgeous stunning set-up, but the book itself is overall too long; I got impatient by the end and started skimming.
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Hey friends! Do you want a book with fairies and magic that doesn't follow the standard formulaic plot? Here ya go.
World building, but easy to read and not info-dumpy. Chatty but not annoying or distracting. Spans a significant amount of time but doesn't get bogged down. Magic has rules but the story also doesn't bother to explain all the rules and lets the magic be magic, not science. Follows the well known fairytale closely enough to make you feel comfortable, but expands, elaborates and rearranges in a way that is so right and natural. Romance but not instalove, instalust, or physical-description-based attraction. No cheap betrayals. No self-insertion characters.
In short, this is what everybody who read ACOTAR and felt annoyed after should give a shot at.
Also, I freakin' CRIED before page 40 and I don't usually cry at books!
The rare fantasy I enjoyed.
World building, but easy to read and not info-dumpy. Chatty but not annoying or distracting. Spans a significant amount of time but doesn't get bogged down. Magic has rules but the story also doesn't bother to explain all the rules and lets the magic be magic, not science. Follows the well known fairytale closely enough to make you feel comfortable, but expands, elaborates and rearranges in a way that is so right and natural. Romance but not instalove, instalust, or physical-description-based attraction. No cheap betrayals. No self-insertion characters.
In short, this is what everybody who read ACOTAR and felt annoyed after should give a shot at.
Also, I freakin' CRIED before page 40 and I don't usually cry at books!
The rare fantasy I enjoyed.
adventurous
hopeful
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
hopeful
lighthearted
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Robin McKinley has done numerous fairytale retellings in her long writing career, and this time she tackles Sleeping Beauty!
In an unnamed country, magic permeates everything, to the point that it's an everyday annoyance for most people - collecting in dust in the corners, turning teapots to mice when you're not looking, and manifesting in babies as a variety of strange and disruptive phenomena. Pretty much everyone knows a fairy and most of them spend their time undoing the various magical shenanigans around them. When the evil fairy Pernicia casts a much larger, more malicious spell onto the infant princess on her name day, visiting young fairy Katriona agrees to help spirit the girl away to be raised in her home village as her cousin. But as the young "Rosie" grows, it becomes clear that she's anything but princess-like, and that Pernicia will stop at nothing to find her, no matter how well-concealed she is.
In terms of tone, Spindle's End is more similar to Rose Daughter than it is to Beauty. The prose is lighthearted and humorous, the worldbuilding based on an abundance of magic, and the story focuses on small-town interactions and a huge cast of minor characters. As is typical for McKinley works, the feeling is cozy and strangely down-to-earth for such a magic-saturated story and I loved the focus on the female relationships in the story, both friendship and familial. The worldbuilding setup was fun and the first part of the story, as Katriona desperately tries to hide the princess, was tense and exciting.
However, the back half of the story doesn't hold up. The middle segments drag and the finale is a confusing mess, leaving me frequently confused as to where the characters were and why they were doing what they were doing. A character will try something for reasons that are unclear, and it will work or fail to work for equally murky reasons, and eventually this all adds up to a conclusion somehow.
A large part of this stems from questionable worldbuilding. While the initial setup of a magic-saturated land is strong, McKinley doesn't give enough focus to how magic actually works, what its limits and rules are, or how this affects the world beyond a few set-dressing quirks, so when the finale depends on characters using and countering magic, it can feel as though new rules are being created on the spot simply to resolve situations rather than being an organic part of the world. By the time everything reached its conclusion, my only response was a flat "okay, sure, I guess".
Worse still are the love interests in the story. McKinley's work is often very romantic, but the actual romance plotlines are typically fairly basic. This is taken to an extreme here, with one of the major characters' love interest coming so out of left field that I barely realized he was supposed to be a love interest until the last few chapters. The other two are better set-up, but are so unimportant to the story that I struggle to remember if either got any speaking lines.
While Spindle's End was a charming read from chapter to chapter, the shaky worldbuilding, confusing finale, and lackluster romance plotlines leave the whole thing a bit unsatisfying.
In an unnamed country, magic permeates everything, to the point that it's an everyday annoyance for most people - collecting in dust in the corners, turning teapots to mice when you're not looking, and manifesting in babies as a variety of strange and disruptive phenomena. Pretty much everyone knows a fairy and most of them spend their time undoing the various magical shenanigans around them. When the evil fairy Pernicia casts a much larger, more malicious spell onto the infant princess on her name day, visiting young fairy Katriona agrees to help spirit the girl away to be raised in her home village as her cousin. But as the young "Rosie" grows, it becomes clear that she's anything but princess-like, and that Pernicia will stop at nothing to find her, no matter how well-concealed she is.
In terms of tone, Spindle's End is more similar to Rose Daughter than it is to Beauty. The prose is lighthearted and humorous, the worldbuilding based on an abundance of magic, and the story focuses on small-town interactions and a huge cast of minor characters. As is typical for McKinley works, the feeling is cozy and strangely down-to-earth for such a magic-saturated story and I loved the focus on the female relationships in the story, both friendship and familial. The worldbuilding setup was fun and the first part of the story, as Katriona desperately tries to hide the princess, was tense and exciting.
However, the back half of the story doesn't hold up. The middle segments drag and the finale is a confusing mess, leaving me frequently confused as to where the characters were and why they were doing what they were doing. A character will try something for reasons that are unclear, and it will work or fail to work for equally murky reasons, and eventually this all adds up to a conclusion somehow.
A large part of this stems from questionable worldbuilding. While the initial setup of a magic-saturated land is strong, McKinley doesn't give enough focus to how magic actually works, what its limits and rules are, or how this affects the world beyond a few set-dressing quirks, so when the finale depends on characters using and countering magic, it can feel as though new rules are being created on the spot simply to resolve situations rather than being an organic part of the world. By the time everything reached its conclusion, my only response was a flat "okay, sure, I guess".
Worse still are the love interests in the story. McKinley's work is often very romantic, but the actual romance plotlines are typically fairly basic. This is taken to an extreme here, with one of the major characters' love interest coming so out of left field that I barely realized he was supposed to be a love interest until the last few chapters. The other two are better set-up, but are so unimportant to the story that I struggle to remember if either got any speaking lines.
While Spindle's End was a charming read from chapter to chapter, the shaky worldbuilding, confusing finale, and lackluster romance plotlines leave the whole thing a bit unsatisfying.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship