Ultimately, the creation of "we" includes the collaborating fantasist and her readers.

This interaction is among the literary qualities of Spindle's End that draw upon classic fantasy. In positioning all of us—the storyteller, the reader, the characters both human and animal, the landscape—as participant in the making of fantastic reality, McKinley also positions her novel within the genre.

McKinley's fantasies—and her retellings in particular—also provide a fascinating response to contemporary literary criticism.

Spindle's End encourages a creative interpretation of the critically noted sexism (Zipes), eroticism (Coover), Freudian/Elektra Complex (Bettelheim), and psychological feminism (Von Franz), available in the "Sleeping Beauty" tale. Indeed, McKinley's novel, like the reader, is subsequently enriched by these various foci of contemporary literary criticism.

McKinley's expressive animals do not gesture towards C. S. Lewis; her landscape, while rich, is not the invented world(s...