Spindle's End

Spindle's End is Robin McKinley's retelling of Sleeping Beauty, published by Putnam's Sons in 2000. It keeps the shape of the old fairy tale and moves the story out of the palace, into a wet, half-forgotten corner of the country where a princess is raised as a village girl.

On the princess's name-day the fairy Pernicia appears and curses the child with a spindle, a pricked finger and a sleep that will carry her off on her twenty-first birthday. A young fairy named Katriona snatches the baby away before the curse can be completed and takes her to Katriona's village, Foggy Bottom, in the marshy district known as The Gig, where she and her aunt raise the child under the name Rosie, after the last of the princess's twenty-one names.

Rosie grows up stubborn and quick, more at home in breeches and among horses than in a drawing room, and becomes a gifted horse leech, while her friend Peony takes to the embroidery and manners expected of a well-bred girl. Katriona's magic has quietly passed something of itself to the child, along with a rare talent for speech with animals. Pernicia, defeated once before and four hundred years in the nursing of her revenge, is still looking for the missing princess.