Sleeping Helena
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Orphaned at birth, Helena receives eight gifts from eight extraordinary aunts. Her gifts make her beautiful, intelligent, talented—as well as headstrong, temperamental, and bound to fulfill a destiny that involves death. Like Sleeping Beauty, Helena receives a final gift on the day of her sixteenth birthday . . . and, as a consequence, all in her domain are bespelled by sleep. A broken mirror becomes a portal to a dark day in a distant past that shattered the lives of her family and altered the future of an entire kingdom.
While the fate of the nation has been decided and cannot be undone, the fate of the family rests on a kiss, a fairy tale king, and what Helena will do when—and if—she wakes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
YellowBoy's first novel under her own name (after 2007's pseudonymous The Bone Whistle) is a darkly poetic retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. When Helena's mother dies in childbirth, her eight "grandaunts" take the baby in and bestow upon her magical gifts like intelligence, grace, and beauty. When the eldest crone, Kitty, gives a gift in the form of a riddle, the other sisters vow to protect the innocent girl against their sister's perceived curse. As Helena grows into a young woman, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the riddle as well as the murky and sometimes tragic events of the sisters' childhoods. On Helena's 16th birthday, she receives Kitty's gift and finally understands the significance of her life and death. This dreamlike story lags at points but will linger in the reader's subconscious long after the last page is turned.
