I ended up getting this book because I’m super intrigued by attempts to make Sleeping Beauty less icky, and also I started humming the Once Upon a Dream song, which is pulled from the Garland Waltz, in the Tchaikovsky ballet. I stumbled on Braswell while killing time in a physical bookstore, and found her version of Aladdin, A Whole New World. What Braswell does here is take the story of Sleeping Beauty – specifically the Disney animated version, and ask the question first, what if True Love’s Kiss didn’t work they thought it would? What if Aurora didn’t wake up? And second, what if Aurora was an active agent in her own rescue? She lives, she is hidden away, she is never given any input into what her life should be, and then she pricks her finger and then she’s just a MacGuffin for the Prince who gets to slay the dragon.
Even if you have a version with no rape, and discount the inherent ickiness of “kiss a random sleeping woman” aspect, it’s also a very passive tale for the princess.
By its very nature, it has a LOT of consent issues, and the straight up rape of a sleeping woman who then gives birth to one or two babies without waking is a commonality in the earliest versions of the tale. Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult
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