Absent Roses

A queen keeps the desperate promise she makes to the godmother of her unborn child. A duke’s son is destined to cut himself on a sword and die before he grows up. An entire economy is derailed when the king forbids spinning throughout the land. A young princess recounts how she finds herself in a foreign court more than a century after her birth. A good fairy and an evil enchantress bicker over blessings and curses. Five times beauty sleeps, five times the story is different from the one you thought you knew. But the story was always different from the one we thought we knew. Besides offering new versions of the Sleeping Beauty tale, Absent Roses also examines earlier examples of young women caught in a magical sleep, and traces their metamorphosis, through medieval romance and early modern tale collections, into the story we do know. Variations on a Tale is a cycle of four books of fairy and folktale retellings, each focusing on one or two tale types and including original retellings of the stories, relevant earlier versions, and an essay exploring their background and history.