From Amazon.com
Fairy tales touch something deep within us, and Donna Jo Napoli is a master at bringing those primal feelings to light. Her retellings of ancient tales such as
The Magic Circle (based on "Hansel and Gretel"),
Zel (based on "Rapunzel"), and
Crazy Jack (based on "Jack and the Beanstalk") flesh out the age-old stories in unexpected ways, imbuing them with psychological resonance for contemporary teens. One of the marks of Napoli's skill is that her stories draw us into the characters' predicaments long before we figure out their original source in folklore. In
Spinners, she and coauthor Richard Tchen weave a tale of a young tailor who cripples himself while spinning gold thread on a magic wheel to win his beloved's hand. Spurned for his ugliness, he watches her marry the miller and die giving birth to the child he knows is his own. The girl grows up to become a master spinner, but only when the cruel young king commands her to spin straw into gold do we begin to sense a creeping familiarity. When a deformed man demands her firstborn child as a return for spinning the gold, we are almost sure. But not until the very last, when to save her baby the young mother must guess her unknown father's secret name, do we, like her, know that this is Rumpelstiltskin, of whom we've heard tell long ago. In Napoli's story-spinning hands, however, Rumpelstiltskin is not a spiteful dwarf but a lonely outcast yearning for the love of his grandchild; rather than a hand- wringing victim, the young queen shows herself to be a strong and resourceful survivor given to imaginative solutions. (Ages 12 to 16)
--Patty Campbell
From Publishers Weekly
Napoli and Tchen spin fairy tale into something less than gold in this attenuated retelling of "Rumpelstiltskin." The villain of that tale, the odd little man who helps the miller's daughter but demands her first-born child, is first seen here as an unnamed lovestruck youth, a tailor. His beloved is carrying his child, but her father, ignorant of his daughter's pregnancy, doubts that the tailor can support her and wants her to marry the wealthy miller. To impress his would-be father-in-law, the tailor promises that he will clothe his bride in gold; to this end, he steals an elderly woman's spinning wheel and ends up obsessed, turning straw into gold but somehow "rumpling" his legAthus earning his lover's disdain and the hated sobriquet Rumpelstiltskin. The narrative then fast-forwards and shifts to Saskia, the miller's daughter (really Rumpelstiltskin's child), whose mother has died in childbirth. After a series of hardships, Saskia becomes renowned for the marvelous yarns she can spin. Girls will enjoy many of the details here, like the yarns Saskia designs out of violets and fruit fibers, but the novel will disappoint anyone expecting Napoli to do here what she did for Hansel and Gretel in The Magic Circle and for Rapunzel in ZelAthis is all back story. While there are intriguing subplots, many are simply dropped, and the characters' motivations implausibly swerve at pivotal moments. In the end, this version fails to offer new insights or perspectives on its famous subject. Ages 12-up. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
