The Rumpelstiltskin Problem (A book)

I want to recommend this book because I know some of you have been finding fairy tales and reading them to get more insight on the show. The stories in this book are too recent to have gained any acceptance into fairy tale lore but they do give you something to think about.

Here’s the book summary, which (happily) is a very good one:

Have you ever wondered just what was going on when that odd little man with the long name stepped up and volunteered to spin straw into gold for the miller’s daughter? If you stop and think about it, there are some very peculiar and rather hard-to-explain components to the story.

Vivian Vande Velde has wondered too, and she’s come up with these six alternative versions of the old legend. A bevy of miller’s daughters confront their perilous situation in very different ways — sometimes comic, sometimes scary. Most of the time, it’s the daughter who gets off safely, but sometimes, amazingly, Rumpelstiltskin himself wins the day. And in one tale, it is the king who cleverly escapes a quite unexpected fate.

I read this book in, like, 2001 and I just re-read it for the third time RIGHT before I got interested in this show. So I have been thinking about it all along. There are so many ways it could go. OUAT is another way. Anyway, the Rumps is epic so read All The Stories. Mmk? 🙂