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Of all the authors that I know, Robin McKinley holds the position as my first favorite author.  Don’t get me wrong–I love Lewis and Tolkien and classic authors like that, but Robin McKinley is no less of a genius than either of those two men.  I recently appreciated this once again while reading Spindle’s End, a retelling of the classic faerie tale Sleeping Beauty.

 

The story begins with a brief rundown on what magic is and how it’s used.  In the world that McKinley has created, magic isn’t some supernatural power--it’s a fact of everyday life.  Magic settles like dust on everything to the extent that people hire faeries to come in and clear out their kettles so that they don’t end up serving their mothers-in-law pansies or something worse.

 

When the queen is–finally–having a baby, she keeps it a secret from the unsuspecting public until the baby is actually delivered.  To mollify her country, the queen decides to hold a name day involving someone from each and every village, as well as twenty-one faerie godmothers (to match the baby’s twenty-one names).  However, like every good faerie tale, there’s some bad lady involved, and in this case it’s the evil faerie Pernicia who casts a spell upon the baby.  The baby will prick her finger on a spindle by her 21st birthday and fall down dead.

 

There “happens” to be a girl there named Kat, and she takes the baby in a desperate effort to save her from Pernicia’s curse.  Nobody knows where the baby went, and they’re waiting to find out the fate of their beloved princess.

 

McKinley’s writing style is superb. Spindle's End is a perfect book to read aloud, for some reason that I can’t quite pinpoint.  I think that it might have something to do with the fact that she tells her stories like you two are sitting down drinking tea and she’s telling you about her life.  There’s almost no objectionable content in her books, either.

 

In Spindle’s End, McKinley has the main character talk to animals.  This seems irrelevant but it isn’t, because this is part of what makes her book so masterful.  I was particularly impressed by her rendition of a cat; she caught the arrogant love that cats almost inevitably have.  If you’ve been around a cat for any length of time, you know how incredibly petty they can be, and she captured that perfectly.

 

So find a copy of Spindle’s End, curl up (preferrably with a cat and a drink) and delve into the complex world created by Robin McKinley.

 

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