Spinning Starlight

With all the fairytale rewritings around, it's nice to see someone breaking the Cinderella/Sleeping Beauty/Beauty and the Beast mould. Based on a fairy tale known various as “The Six Swans,” “The Twelve Brothers” and “Udea and Her Seven Brothers”, Spinning Starlight takes on a fairly challenging tale in a fascinating way.

In the traditional story, the brothers are turned into swans– and the only way to break the spell is for their sister to spin each one a shirt out of nettles and stay silent for seven years. For Liddi Jantzen, our heroine, this means that her brtoehrs are stuck in a strange transdimensional tube, while she herself is implanted with a chip that will kill them if she speaks.

Over the course of the book, Liddi grows from a frightened young girl with doubts about her own abilities to a strong young woman, who has learned to communicate despite the obstacles, with the original story woven into the fabric of the novel in some surprising ways. Despite some minor flaws in pacing and worldbuilding (I'm a librarian– it's hard for me to suspend disbelief about nearly seven worlds of humans abandoning writing systems), the novel is solid, and engrossing enough the put off going to bed in order to finish it.