Spindle's End by Robin McKinley
422 pages
Published 2000
Read from June 30 to July 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A fun and thoroughly enjoyable restructuring of the tale of Sleeping Beauty, charming and folksy and populated by a progressive cast of strong, competent women. The prose gets a little breathless and busy at times, hurrying forward and backward to develop the story, jumping ahead and then backfilling events in between, a common enough storytelling technique that nonetheless got to be too much at times for my currently addled attention span. That's not a mark against the book itself, merely against my ability to stay invested these days in anything for longer than about a hundred pages. The ending especially was hectic with everything going on, a messy gathering of threads dropped throughout the foregoing four hundred pages that I couldn't help but feel could have been handled more elegantly. That doesn't detract from the essential humor and sweetness of the book as a whole.
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