The Sleeper and the Spindle

Neil Gaiman's The Sleeper and the Spindle is a fairy tale for 10 year olds about a queen who puts down her wedding dress and picks up her sword.

What happens

She's a week from being married and she is not happy about it. She lies in bed listening to the carpenters building the seats her people will watch her marry from, and thinks that every hammer blow sounds like a heartbeat. Marriage, she decides, is the end of her life if life means having choices.

Then three dwarfs come back from under the mountains with news.

In the kingdom on the other side, people are falling asleep. Not at bedtime. Wherever they happen to be standing. At the forge, on the milking stool, in the fields. Birds drop out of the sky asleep. It's spreading a mile or two every day and it is coming this way.

At the inn nobody can agree whose fault it is. A witch, says one. A bad fairy, says another. An enchantress, says the pot-girl, and they go round again.

The queen listens, asks sensible questions, then cancels her wedding. She sends word to the villages to evacuate. She hands the kingdom to her first minister and tells him not to break it. She kisses her fiancé until he stops sulking. Then she calls for her mail shirt. She calls for her sword. She rides east.

Here's the clever bit, and it's lovely to watch a reader get it. The queen lived with dwarfs when she was small. She once slept for a year and woke up fine. Nobody spells it out. Your reader has to put it together.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The sleepers are grey with cobwebs, because the spiders never stopped. When the queen walks into the inn, every sleeping head turns slowly to face her, eyes still shut, and their lips move together to say the same thing. It's a handful of sentences and it's the sort that stays with you.

If your reader is easily spooked, this isn't the bedtime one. If they like being unsettled, it's a treat.

It also helps to know the old stories first. The book assumes you know how a girl in a glass coffin ends up, and how a spinning wheel ruins a christening, and then it does something else with both. A reader who doesn't know them will still follow the plot and will miss half the pleasure.

What to read next

For the same author being unsettling much closer to home, there's Coraline, where a girl finds a door in her new flat and what's on the other side would very much like her to stay.