Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty
Author: Jane Yolen
Genre: Children's Books
Book Type: Hardcover


(from the inside front cover)

There are few tales as romantic as The Sleeping Beauty, few whose romance is expressed with such moving simplicity; and perhaps that is why the story of the Princess whose hundred-year sleep is ended by the Prince she will love stays with us long after we first encounter it. Now, in this beautiful new edition, the beloved tale is lovingly retold by the well-known children's author Jane Yolen and charmingly illustrated in full color by Ruth Sanderson, whose illustrations also graced the pages of the Knopf edition of Heidi.

It is indeed the romance of this tale that infuses these paintings, each one of which brings another part of the story vividly to life on the page. We see the King and Queen in their great happiness at the birth of their daughter...the royal banquet at which the thirteen fairies bestow their gifts--and, one of them, a terrible curse--upon the beautiful infant...the fateful meeting between the child and the old woman at her spinning wheel...the once-splendid castle overgrown with brambles, and the room where the Prince finally finds, and awakens the Sleeping Beauty...