She’d been using the spell to harvest power and youth from the princess and her kingdom, and the old woman, the only conscious person left in the castle all those long years, was actually the princess all along. It turns out that the titular sleeper was never the princess at all, but the witch who cast the spell. The queen kisses the girl to awaken her, and it works-but all is not as it seems. There they find a very, very old woman, and a beautiful girl asleep on the bed in the tallest tower.
After a long journey beset with enemies, they get to the castle, and make their way inside.
She postpones her nuptials, dons some armor, and sets off. She, having already fallen victim to and surmounted a sleeping curse of her own, resolves to go herself to the neighboring kingdom, travel to the palace, and break the curse. The dwarves return to Snow White (or, as she is referred to in the story, simply as ‘the queen’) on the eve of her wedding with the bad news. Their only hope is that the spell on the princess might be broken. The country’s princess, and with her, the palace at the center of the kingdom, had been cursed many years previous by a spurned witch, and the curse is spreading outward from the castle and across the land. They travel under the mountains to the neighboring kingdom to buy gifts for Snow White, who is queen of her own kingdom, and discover that that kingdom is falling prey to some sort of sleeping spell. We begin with three dwarves, whose names we do not learn. The tale told in The Sleeper and the Spindle exceeded my expectations in some ways, and disappointed me in others. However, while the story is excellently told, and the pictures are beautifully drawn, it left me with mixed feelings in the end. A gorgeously illustrated fairy tale retelling by Neil Gaiman, featuring Snow White as the warrior who saves Sleeping Beauty from her tower? Sign me up! It only just came out in the US last week, and I snapped it up when I saw it in my comic book shop. When The Sleeper and the Spindle was first announced, I was excited.
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