[.ca] Spinners (ISBN 014131110X)

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

Sad But Good:
I've never really enjoyed the story of Rumpelstiltskin but this story was so moving that I thoroughly enjoyed it. The tailor/spinner in the story is never referred to by his real name, instead he is just "tailor." When he was young he was in love with a farmer's daughter who was a spinster. In exchange for her hand in marriage the farmer demands a wedding gown made of gold. In making the gown by turning straw into gold on an old spinning wheel the young man cripples himself and becomes deformed. The young woman then scorns him and marries a miller. Later, the woman has his child (they'd slept together before he became crippled) and dies in childbirth. The story then chronicles the daughter's journey to adulthood and queenship in parallel with the tormented life of the tailor. Overall an extremely sad book that makes you really feel sorry for the tailor but one that is exquisitely written.

Heart-wrenching and complex:
This story brings much insight into the otherwise unsensical fairy tale "Rumplestiltskin". This is not a "retelling" per se, but a "what if" kind of story. "What if" Rumplestilksin was not just a evil little man, "what if" the miller's daughter was forced to marry the king, "what if" there was some other connection between the girl and the gold-spinner besides the obvious one in the original tale? Filled with the "what if's", this book shows that Rumplestilksin is one to be pitied, that so is the miller's daughter to be pitied, for because of her father's pitiful lie, she lives the rest of her life in soulful misery - until the birth of her first child. But that joy also is threatened because of the promise she herself gave to Rumplestiltskin. Saskia up to that point is living only to survive - she has no love for her husband, only a semblence of love for her childhood friend and her father. We find that both Rumplestiltskin and Saskia want to live, though they are both miserable yearning for something that they both lack in their lives - not because of their own shortcomings, however. They are both victims, and it wrenches your heart. A beautiful story with powerful themes - emotionally complex, easy to engage in.

Bittersweet retelling of Rumpelstiltskin:
Spinners is the tale of a young tailor who is in love with a beautiful woman. He promises the woman's father that he can make her a wedding gown of gold. The father says that if the tailor's boast is true then he will allow the woman to marry him. He manages to spin straw into gold and make the dress but he becomes a cripple in the process. Because of his condition, he loses the woman he loves and their unborn daughter. Spinners is a bittersweet retelling of Rumpelstiltskin. It far surpasses the original story because it examines all the characters' motivations which makes the story more meaningful. The characters are very well written and the authors really make you feel for all of them. I found myself wanting every character to have a happy ending even though I knew that wasn't likely. If you are a fan of re-told fairy tales then I highly recommend Spinners. I know I'll probably read everything by Donna Jo Napoli that I can get my hands on.

A Tragic Story of Love, Betrayal, and Heartbreak:
The story begins as happily as one can expect of a retold fairytale. The tailor and his beloved, who happens to be a spinster, share passionate moments together within a barn. He goes to her father, expecting him to accept his suit, but the father doubts he can provid for his daughter as well as the old miller can. In an act of desperation the tailor claims he can spin straw into gold, which is when the reader begins to feel a prick of familirarity. He finds the means to do this on a magic wheel that he takes from an old spinster. He spins for over a day and ends up crippling his leg, but as promised he spins her a gold wedding dress and she repays the poor tailor by abandoning him because of his ugliness and his crippled state, leaving him for the miller. He soon finds out she is pregnant with his child and he plans on winning her back by revealing her shame to the miller, thinking that she would turn to him as her last hope, but she dies in childbirth. The tailor leaves town without a bacward glance, carrying the spinning wheel on his back. The story then flash forwards ten years, giving us a glimpse of the life of his daughter, Sasika. She shortly thereafter becomes a master spinster and after several plot twists they meet. The story definitely feels familiar after the spinner spins the straw into gold for Sasika. I held my breath, thinking that maybe the spinner wouldn't ask for the child because she was his daughter after all, but he still does, for reasons I will not reveal, in fear of spoiling it for those who haven't read this book. I'm glad they stuck to the original story, but I still felt like at this point the story was starting to fall apart. There is less description, the spinner becomes less likeable because he spurns the love of Elke (the women who got the spinner a job at the castle and gave him a home in the woods), he refuses to explain anything to Sasika, and he wants to selfishly take her baby. Though I couldn't really blame him for any of this and I felt the pain he had gone through, the end still left me longing for answers to the questions I had. The end is very tragic and they could have added another twenty pages to satisfy the curiosity of the reader, but it was still worth the read. It adds depth and meaning to the original story and all in all it was a wonderful read. I hightly recommend it, but if you want a happy ending, you'd be better off reading another fairytale.

....breathtaking:
this book was, is, amazing. its tender, precise details, for one thing, were beautiful, as all donna jo napoli's books are. and her partership with richard tchen was sensational. then, its sadness. this book is very sad, beautifully sad. and the ending is depressing! but i wouldn't let that ruin it for you. i reccomend this book, i definitely reccomend this book. it is the story of a man who loved someone so much, he was willing to do the impossible. the story of loss, and obsession. it is the story of saskia. i enjoyed the descriptions of her yarns, the simple beauty of them. the only thing i didn't like was the ending, and what happens to the man. but sadness is a part of every story, and this one just happens to be a beautiful one, one that you shouldn't let slip by you. READ THIS BOOK!