Spindle's End [Paperback]

The evil fairy Pernicia has set a curse on Princess Briar-Rose: she is fated to prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into an endless, poisoned sleep. Katriona, a young fairy, kidnaps the princess in order to save her; she and her aunt raise the child in their small village, where no one knows her true identity. But Pernicia is looking for her, intent on revenge for a defeat four hundred years old. Robin McKinley's masterful version of Sleeping Beauty is, like all of her work, a remarkable literary feat.Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal forThe Hero and the Crownand a Newbery Honor forThe Blue Sword. Her other books includeSunshine; theNew York TimesbestsellerSpindle's End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy taleBeauty and the Beast,Beauty and Rose Daughter; and a retelling of theRobin Hoodlegend,The Outlaws of Sherwood. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson.

Chapter I

The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if you didn’t, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn’t have to be anything scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful household—magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in which it found itself—but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender-and-gold pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the pansies—put dry in a vase—would probably last a day, looking like ordinary pansies, before they went greyish-dun and collapselӝ