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Expanding, transforming, and subverting the magical tale of Sleeping Beauty, Rebecca Solnit revitalizes this classic story with a new perspective: Maya, the sister who stayed awake.
Waking Beauty tells of Maya’s great adventures, the inspiring, extraordinary artist and change-maker who “found [beauty] everywhere and gave it to everyone”; Atlas, who guarded the golden apples and was definitely not a prince; and Ida, who slept for a century and woke up in a very different world. The perfect follow-up to Cinderella Liberator, Solnit seamlessly weaves these compelling narratives, crafting a story that is as delightful and enchanting as it is empowering.
“Playful and inventive in its handling of gender roles, this fairy tale mashup is surprising and delightful, inverting expectations. A retold fairy tale wrapped in a fantasy cloak, Waking Beauty satisfies and charms with its reinvented gender roles and inventive magic.”
—Foreword Reviews, starred review
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster. A prolific writer, her publications by Haymarket Books include Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and she is a co-creator of the City of Women map. Her other works include Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, was released in March 2020. A former student of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.