In a far-off kingdom, a beautiful young girl is locked in an enchanted sleep, which also afflicts everyone else in that land. You may think you know this story and how it will end... but you really don't. 
 And it takes a master storyteller like Neil Gaiman to not only give a clever new twist to fairy tale plots, but do it with an effortless elegance that makes it seem utterly natural and original. "The Sleeper and the Spindle" entwines the echoes of two traditional fairy tales, but subverts everything you expect from such a story -- from the hero (no, it's not a lesbian retelling) to the resolution, this is a stunningly lovely, thorns-and-roses tale that brings suspense back into these stories. 
 A group of dwarfs are traveling to buy a wedding gift for a young queen, who is to be married the following week. But on their travels, they hear of a "plague of sleep" that is afflicting a neighboring land -- a young princess in a castle surrounded by roses and thorns, cursed to a magical sleep which has spread to other people in her land. Unfortunately... it is continuing to spread, and anyone who tries to rescue the princess and break the spell is horribly killed by the witch/fairy/whatever. "She's old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death," one character warns. 
 So the dwarves tell the young queen, who decides to deal with the situation right away (even though it means postponing her wedding). Along with her dwarf friends, she ventures through a land of cobweb-draped sleepers, toward the high tower where a beautiful young maiden sleeps, and a strange old crone has lived alone for decades. But all is not as it seems, and the young queen must summon all her wit and strength to defeat the evil creature that rules this sleeping land. 
 "The Sleeper and the Spindle" has an airy, silver-embroidered delicacy that you don't find in many fairy tale retellings -- normally they lose some of the magic that is spun into the original tales. Gaiman painstakingly links together two different fairy tales (one obvious, one more subtle) and adds some surprising twists without overcomplicating the story -- it's a straightforward quest that begins to curl and twist when the queen reaches her destination. 
 Gaiman has the rare skill of being able to adapt his writing style to whatever story he's telling, so his writing here is luminously beautiful without ever becoming too personal -- in short, he's writing a fairy tale. But he dips occasionally into the perspective of the unnamed (but obvious) young queen and her dwarf companions, as they wander through the eerie cobwebbed kingdom. And he describes the story with a flair for both enchantment ("sat on the moss beneath an oak tree, and tasted the stillness, heartbeat by heartbeat") and the ugly underbelly of the tale ("close to the stone of the castle there were only dead, brown stems and creepers, with old thorns sharp as knives"). 
 Furthermore, this story is graced with some truly enchanted pen-and-ink drawings by Chris Riddell, which suit Gaiman's story very well -- they're very slightly cartoony in proportions, but are also delicately elaborate and detailed, with a slightly translucent quality. He also adds touches of gold to many of these pictures -- often a golden frame, but sometimes other details like the dwarves' hats or the young queen's mirror. Some of the pictures are also framed by images of thorns and skulls. 
 While Gaiman doesn't make the identity of the unnamed young queen obvious, it's very clear from the beginning who she is, fairy-tale-heroine-wise -- and he gives her a gravity and wisdom from her past troubles that makes her far more heroic than a straightforward princess-kissing prince would be. Bits of her backstory -- and why she chose to handle this strange magical event -- are sprinkled through the story, rounding out her tale and why she feels oddly hesitant to have her "happily ever after." 
 "The Sleeper and the Spindle" is a delightfully eerie fairy-tale mash-up that is both a sequel and a subversive twist on the original, with an exquisite delicacy that makes it feel masterful. And of course, it's always nice to see ladies armor up and take on the villains.