JoSelle's fantasy short To Sleep, Perchance is available to subscribers in the September 2006 issue of Byzarium. You can catch up with JoSelle at her blog.

There are very few writers who are skilled at making the reader a part of the writing process. Their stories are written in such a way that the reader is left with much to infer. Is the event the protagonist describes really happening, or is it within their mind? Is this sentence a metaphor, or is it to be taken literally? I tend to enjoy this type of writing and often come away from the experience feeling connected to the piece on a deep level. I don't mind not having my hand held.

Joselle Vanderhooft's novel The Tale of the Miller's Daughter, a dark retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, falls into this category. Her writing is poetic and dreamlike.

I was never named and never asked for a thing.

I am only a girl, and for me that must ever be enough. Later I will have more than this: as many dresses as there are colors in the seasons, as many shoes as there are wishes, and glittering on my toes like those fulfilled. But that will come later, much later, when the snow falls and I am as brittle and cold as a twig.

The book speaks to us with the voice of its nameless heroine who, like her countrymen and women, live in thrall to a sadistic king. This king takes pleasure in the misery and suffering of his subjects. Our heroine has lost her name thanks to her abusive father, a miller who sells her as a bride to this king in short order. Our heroine has little warning. Late one night she is plucked from her home and taken, terrified, to the castle. There she is led to a room filled with straw and given the classic instruction: spin the straw into gold by morning, or lose her life.

Though the book stays true to many of the events in the classic Rumpelstiltskin yarn, Vanderhooft does not let the legend constrain her, and urges the reader down many a dark and disturbing road.

Overall, The Tale of the Miller's Daughter reminded me most of the movie Snow White, A Tale of Terror, in that it also successfully reclaims a sanitized fairy tale's dark and bloody roots.

The Tale of the Miller's Daughter is a powerful work, and Joselle Vanderhooft is a writer to keep a close eye on.