(128 pages)
Have you ever wondered just what was going on when that odd little man with the long name stepped up and volunteered to spin straw into gold for the miller’s daughter? If you stop and think about it, there are some very peculiar and rather hard-to-explain components to the story. Vivian Vande Velde has wondered too, and she’s come up with these six alternative versions of the old legend. A bevy of miller’s daughters confront their perilous situation in very different ways — sometimes comic, sometimes scary. Most of the time, it’s the daughter who gets off safely, but sometimes, amazingly, Rumpelstiltskin himself wins the day. And in one tale, it is the king who cleverly escapes a quite unexpected fate.
This was really great fun, which made me realise how ridiculous some fairytales are and how much more intrigung they could be with a slightly different viewpoint. All six of the reworkings were really sharply witty, and the different takes on the strange fairytale mad this book nigh on impossible to put down. Highlyrecommended!!
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