A contemporary retelling, for all the reasons discussed here, cannot help but to give voice to current perceptions of social sensitivity. Robin McKinley's Spindle's End gives expression to contemporary, feminist-informed expectations of gender by translating outdated norms and by reawakening characters that have been historically and traditionally flattened into twodimensionality—as befits a retelling of "Sleeping Beauty." In liberating the sleeping landscape and the trapped, but no less imagined (nor any less real) animal world, Spindle's End describes our philosophies and ideologies regarding our environment and the creatures with whom we inhabit that environment. And in negotiating the mythic elements of the human experience through a memory- and dream-laden halfdeath, a long sleep, we maintain the mythic elements of the human experience in a mindful and conscientious manner. This is, after all and at its best, what contemporary retellings of folk and fairy tales can...