This year, the Spring/Summer Issue of The Fairy Tale Magazine is all about Sleeping Beauty! Submissions are open January 15th-21st (details found here), and while you work on your stories and poems, you can take inspiration from our roundup of Sleeping Beauty inspired books! These titles are the perfect bedtime stories to inspire sweet dreams.
Let’s begin with P. L. Travers book, About the Sleeping Beauty, a collection of five traditional Sleeping Beauty Tales accompanied by a beautiful essay on the meaning of the fairy tale by the writer of Mary Poppins. Now sold in used editions, this collection is perfect for the Sleeping Beauty scholar!
Jane Yolen sets her stunning novel Briar Rose among the European forests of World War II, using fairy tale imagery to process the horrors of the Holocaust. This riveting and powerful story twists fantasy and reality together to explore the painful and poignant truths of human existence.
Neil Gaiman twists the story of Sleeping Beauty with the story of Snow White in his beautifully illustrated novella The Sleeper and the Spindle. Gaiman’s intelligent prose and Riddell’s gorgeous illustrations will transform the way you understand sleeping maidens and the lives they lead.
Readers who love Robin McKinley’s classic fairy tale retellings will delight in her Sleeping Beauty novel, Spindle’s End. This spellbinding tale tells the story of Princess Rosie who is whisked away to keep her safe from an evil fairy’s curse.
A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow takes Sleeping Beauty into the multiverse with an exciting contemporary tale illustrated with the slightly altered silhouettes of Arthur Rackham. The first of her two fractured fables (followed by A Mirror Mended), Harrow’s book introduces readers to Zinnia Gray, a young woman who pricks her finger on a spinning wheel while attending a Sleeping Beauty themed birthday party in an abandoned prison tower.
In Rosamund Hodge’s novel, What Monstrous Gods, a beautiful woman named Lia is fated to wake a sleeping prince and kill the sorcerer who raised a deadly briar around the palace, but complications arise when an unexpected romantic attraction occurs. This book is full of atmospheric world-building. You can read my review here.
Girl, Serpent, Thorn, by Melissa Bashardoust, is a feminist fairy tale about the dangers and powers of curses. A woman cursed to be poisonous to the touch must decide if she is willing to leave the garden that serves as her prison in this Persian inspired Sleeping Beauty tale.
Rosalyn Briar’s Her Dark Enchantments tells the origin story of the fairy who becomes the villain of Sleeping Beauty. In this novel, it is the villain who grows up in an isolated tower, and it is her power that earns her the titles of “Spider”, “Witch”, “Wicked Fairy”, and “Mistress of All Evil.’ You can read my review here.
A Wicked Thing, by Rhiannon Thomas, moves the story of Sleeping Beauty beyond her happily-ever-after. When Princess Aurora wakes up after one hundred years of sleep, she struggles to cope with a life that has doesn’t recognize and a fiancé she hardly knows.
Shonna Slayton tackles Sleeping Beauty in Book Five of her Fairy-tale Inheritance Series Sleeping Beauty’s Spindle. Set in 1894 Vermont, this novel features a spindle made from fairy wood that just might make wishes come true.
Finally, if art inspires you, check out Mahlon Craft’s Sleeping Beauty, a gorgeous picture book illustrated by award winning fantasy artist Kinuko Y. Craft. Inspired by the style of Baroque painters, the pictures in this book will breathe new life into the fairy tale you know and love.
We hope you enjoyed this roundup of Sleeping Beauty inspired books, and we hope it will inspire you to dream up your own stories and poems to submit to our Spring/Summer Sleeping Beauty Issue! Sweet Dreams!
Kelly Jarvis is the Contributing Writer for The Fairy Tale Magazine. Her work has also been featured in A Moon of One’s Own, Baseball Bard, Blue Heron Review, Corvid Queen, Eternal Haunted Summer, Forget Me Not Press, Mermaids Monthly, The Chamber Magazine, The Magic of Us, and the World Weaver Press Anthology Mothers of Enchantment: New Tales of Fairy Godmothers. Her first novella, Selkie Moon, comes out in 2025. You can connect with her on Facebook (Kelly Jarvis, Author) or Instagram (@kellyjarviswriter) or find her at https://kellyjarviswriter.com/
Cover Image: Rene Cloke