Sleeping Beauty (A Goodnight, Sleeptight Storybook; Grandreams; 1992; ret. Grace De La Touche; illus. Pam Storey)

Sleeping Beauty
Illustrated by Pam Storey
Story re-told by Grace De La Touche
© 1992 Grandreams Limited
Published by Grandreams Limited
Jadwin House, 205/211 Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2JU
Printed in Italy.
ISBN 1-85830-012-6

This retelling of Sleeping Beauty by Grace De La Touche, illustrated by Pam Storey, was copyrighted to Grandreams in 1992. It was published as part of Grandreams' Goodnight, Sleeptight Storybook series, as part of a quartet alongside retellings of The Three Little Pigs, Snow White, and Aladdin, likely in a boxed set, as all share the same ISBN.

Back cover of Sleeping Beauty

For an overview of the Goodnight, Sleeptight Storybook collection, with links to my reviews of the other books in the series, see Goodnight, Sleeptight Storybook Series (Grandreams, 1990).

Book details

The front cover shows a sleeping girl in striped pyjamas sleeping in a green bed. She is snuggled into blue and white bedding, with a black and white pussycat. The picture is framed by leaves and vines. (Note: This image of Sleeping Beauty doesn't align with the inner illustrations of the book, which feature a canopied bed in red and a princess dressed all in white). 

The inside of the front cover features an image of the castle on a hill (covered by lively squiggles of briar), with a clear path leading up to it. The image is framed by leaves, and there is a dragonfly, rabbit, and mouse in the foreground. The title page features a spinning wheel on grass inside another leafy frame, with publication details below. The story takes place over 20 pages, beginning on the back of the title page and ending on the inside of the back cover.

The story - retold by Grace De La Touche

As with the other stories in this set, the story begins "A long time ago and far away..." In this story, we are introduced to a royal couple who have just had their first child. The King is delighted to have a daughter, and they intend to invite all the fairies of the kingdom to bless her. They struggle to remember how many there are now – twelve or thirteen? There is no  fear or resentment of the thirteenth fairy, no deliberate snub. In the end they send twelve invitations. 

"A thirteenth fairy had not been heard of for so long that it was presumed that she was dead. No invitation was sent." 

I like this attempt to emphasise the innocence of the royal family. Even after the thirteenth fairy arrives, "furious at being left out", the hapless royal couple are practically wringing their hands: "But we thought she was dead... What can we do?" 

The thirteenth fairy is described as "a small dark figure", who arrives in a screaming fit at being left out, curses the baby, and disappears in a flash. She reappears in the story disguised as an old woman on the princess's sixteenth birthday, ensures the princess pricks her figure, and (in an unexpected gesture of kindness for someone who had originally cursed her to die) picks the sleeping princess up and lays her on the bed. She is not mentioned again until the story's end, which states "The bad fairy was never heard of again." 

The princess succumbing to the curse on her sixteenth birthday is obviously orchestrated by the thirteenth fairy, but is also explained by everyone forgetting about the curse, since all spinning wheels had long been destroyed. It's only when the King and Queen return from a far away visit, and find her missing on the day of her birthday party, that her parents raise an alarm: "Today is her sixteenth birthday – the day when the curse may fall. ... She must be found."

While everyone is searching for her, she has gone exploring up the abandoned Great South Tower, where she meets the thirteenth fairy, pricks her finger, and falls asleep. I liked the description of the cascading slumbering, including even animals and insects on the grounds.

A hundred years go by and the prince that eventually finds the princess does so because he tries to enter the hedge that hides the castle at an opportune moment. While other princes were "cut to bits" (and presumably died?), he finds a pathway opens for him. We're told this is simply because "the one hundred years were up. The curse was lifting." His kiss of the princess is therefore presumably completely unnecessary to lift the curse. She would have awoken by herself without his presence. But the prince does find and kiss the princess, both of them falling in love at first sight, and the birthday feast the castle workers had been preparing a hundred years ago transforms into an engagement party.

There are some interesting elements in this retelling, but the brevity of the text doesn't allow for much in the way of plot and character development. Instead we get hints of what this story could be – and hints always work well with child readers, allowing them to use their own imaginations to fill in the gaps in the story.

The illustrations - Pam Storey

I enjoyed Pam Storey's cosy illustrations for this tale. All the characters, including the king and queen, princess and her prince, are plump and homely looking, with sizable noses and rotund forms (in almost all scenes – in occasional scenes the princess is illustrated with a smaller nose and/or trimmer waistline). The setting is the eighteenth century, with characters wearing white wigs (the women's very high), different styles of cravat, and other costumes of the era.

The prince appears with and without wig, and his costume changes – perhaps presumed to have removed his vest and coat when attacking the hedge that guards the castle.

He knows about the hedge because he is riding by a village and hears an old man speaking in the village square: 

Legend says that the Princess lies asleep behind that great briar hedge just outside the village. In my grandfather's day, you could see the topmost turret of her tower, so they say.

This was a very fortuitous moment for the prince to be passing by, but I could imagine those lines delivered in a thick ye olde Somerset accent, and I enjoyed the image Storey drew of the old man enthusiastically telling his tale.

The one aspect of the illustrations that really got me thinking, though, was the depiction of the thirteenth fairy. While all the other other fairies are dressed in light shades of white, blue and green, and illustrated with impeccable fair-haired coiffures, the thirteenth fairy is dressed in black, has a mountainous frazzle of curly black hair, a much longer nose than everyone else, and a bristly chin to boot. That depiction didn't really gel with the story's attempt to make the christening faux pas a big accident. With such a stereotypically villainous appearance, it was hard to believe that fairy was ever considered in the same light as the other twelve fairies and not invited by accident. But it does make the reading of the story simpler: the thirteenth fairy was clearly "the bad fairy".