Riddell draws in pen and ink, eschewing color-save for select gold accents-and pouring his energy into myriad, spidery lines and delicate cross-hatching that recall Aubrey Beardsley’s eerie set pieces. Something new is going on, and readers will be carried to the end by the whirlwind force of Gaiman’s imagination. It isn’t until the travelers penetrate the castle that things tilt sideways. He has written and illustrated many books of his own, including Ottoline and the Yellow Cat and Ottoline Goes to School, and has illustrated, for Bloomsbury UK, The Graveyard Book Coraline and Fortunately, the Milk as well as The Sleeper and the Spindle. And then you woke again, none the worse for it.” Traveling to the cursed kingdom, the queen and dwarves encounter threatening zombie sleepers and more, but the storyline is still recognizable underneath the new details. Chris Riddell is an acclaimed British artist who lives in Brighton, England. Alert readers won’t miss the hint to the queen’s identity: “Would I sleep, as they did?” she asks one of the dwarfs, who replies, “You slept for a year. Three dwarves discover a realm in which everyone has fallen asleep, and they cross into the next country to warn its queen of the great plague that threatens her people. In this captivating and darkly funny tale, Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell have twisted together the familiar and the new as well as the beautiful and the wicked to tell a brilliant version of Snow. Always a superb spinner of tales, Gaiman presents a filigreed elaboration of Sleeping Beauty that, before long, reveals itself as something more.
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