I love all the fairy-tale retellings that are being released these days and A Curse Dark as Gold is one of the best I have come across yet. Bunce has taken on a retelling of the Rumplestiltskin tale. As she points out, it's a tale about the power of names, and yet the heroine is never given one (she's always the miller's daughter or the queen). Bunce examines both the power of names and the power of words in general, laying out the falseness of "words will never hurt me". When reading the original story I always saw the mill as a flour mill, and the miller's daughter's spinning as that of cottage industry. In A Curse Dark as Gold the tale takes place in the Industrial Revolution and the mill is a woolen mill. As soon as I read of the change, it seemed an obvious one, as many of the best ideas do. No Miller has been able to pass the mill to his son in generations, all of said sons dying in infancy or childhood. Instead the mill has passed haphazardly through nephews and cousins until it finds itself in the hands of the last two Millers, girls. Fighting against both the idea that they cannot run the mill, and the superstitions of the people of the village who wonder if the mill is cursed, Charlotte Miller is dealt blow after blow until she finds herself in such dire straights that when a mysterious man who calls himself Jack Spinner comes to her with a bargain, she accepts. But in doing so, has she saved the mill, or begun the process that will finally destroy it?
