Today on Classic Fantasy books: Spinners by Donna Jo Napoli review

Put down the remote, for God’s sake.

May 7, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where read: On a paperback

I’m not actually super into retelling of fairy tales, not that there is anything wrong with them, but it never was my thing. I picked this book up at a scholastic bookfair (a.k.a. nerdy teenage girl pleasure dome of happiness) when I was about twelve or thirteen however, and somehow (probably due to my having read it at an impressionable age) it stuck with me.

This is a retelling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin (did I spell that correctly?) and this is basically all you need to know, since this is quite a short book and if you are even mildly curious, you may as well pick it up. Although how you are going to go about doing this... I'm afraid your guess is as good as mine, although I would try used book resellers. This book does not seem to be available on Amazon Kindle, at least in my country… and hasn’t been for years, as I recall that I tried to buy it on Kindle more than 8 years ago and it wasn’t available then and still isn’t now. The funny thing is, other Donna Jo Napoli books are, so why should this one be any different? Off topic, I recall another book I tried to buy on Kindle which weirdly isn’t available - Shogun by James Clavell - which forced me to buy a physical copy, my old red paperback sadly worn and missing pages by now. I am dreading opening it even as we speak, as I find that these Elder Goblin eyes are not quite what they used to be and have gotten spoiled by the ability of the Kindle to increase a book’s font size.

But I digress.

Spinners is a wonderful little fantasy that transports one to a fairy tale village girl’s life, which I find appeals to the escapist in me greatly. I absolutely refuse to be embarrassed about this! I mean, can you think of any greater escape from your humdrum life of living in a big, overpopulated city, waking up, making breakfast for your kids, putting on boring clothes and painful heels, going to meetings in the office, getting stuck in traffic, and answering stupid emails, than for a few hours imagining you are a beautiful but poor (miller’s daughter, remember?) village wench with long golden hair with the ability to spin magical yarns (like, literal yarns to make into thread and cloth, not tall tales) out of flowers and plants, and who is so clever to boot that out of all the other village wenches, you catch the eye of the handsome and rich (who cares if he is a greedy bastard?) prince that lords it in a castle over your village? How can you not eat this up?? Is this going to win a Pulitzer anytime soon? Probably not. Is this Fantasy I want to BE in? Yes please!

My real question is, why hasn’t this been made into a Netflix flick yet?? The plot of this book is so much better than the endless other princess stories on Netflix I have seen so far, like The Princess Switch and the godawful The Princess Switch 2, which I couldn’t even finish. Bridgerton, which I think might be about princesses, is equally unwatchable for me. There are more but I cannot for the life of me recall their names. But I mean, if princess stories and “cottage-core” (ughhh I despise this tag) are trending right now, this book is potential screenplay gold. Netflix needs a better research department ( I volunteer).

The Princess Switch, by the way, was released in 2018, which, if you think about, is nearing a decade ago. BUT Netflix manages to keep it, for lack of a better word, relevant, by sticking it on your homepage every Christmas and in its rolling categories of “Feel Good movies” or “Romantic Comedies” or “Fun Chillax times” or whatever random categories shows up each month. And this marketing strategy is brilliant, because by doing this it basically revives old movies for new audiences, milking those old dusty IPs for all they're worth.

And for God’s sake, why shouldn’t books have the same? I don’t ever want books to go on a streaming type plan, of course, but old books deserve to have a sort of way to remind audiences that they are there. I mean, books age better than movies, I think, and these classics deserve not to be forgotten by reason solely of their having been released a long time ago (Spinners is a 1999 novel, for example).

The closest I can think of is that when I power up my Kindle, I will usually get ads for books, but to be honest, I have never clicked on one. And the ads always seem to be for new books, not classics.

Actually, I do think that Amazon tries to suggest my next read based on the Kindle books I have purchased thus far, but their algorithm doesn’t seem to work for me, i.e., I don’t think I have ever discovered my next great fantasy or science fiction book this way. I would download some samples of Amazon’s suggestions, but nine times out of ten the recommendations have not appealed to me.  (I have discovered some interesting chef’s autobiographies based on my previous purchase histories of Anthony’s Bourdain’s books, however, so maybe the AI is just deficient in its taste in science fiction and fantasy). The problem is, I think Amazon recommends mostly what is trending now, regardless of quality, which means that unless an older book is currently on the Tiktok or whatever, it is unlikely to show up in your Kindle storefront.

So until such time that someone brilliant manages to find a better way to revive interest in old but great books, this Elder Goblin is here to harangue the youngins into just, for God’s sake, putting down the remote once in awhile, and instead of wasting time watching some lame made-for-TV (is this still something people say?) princess romcom containing a rehash of better romcoms that came before it, give Spinners a whirl. You won’t regret it.