Hello again! It’s me, Milky. Firstly I want to thank you all for helping me decide what to write about, you made your votes and in the end.. I still can’t choose, so I’m going to do a bit of each! There will be little posts about japanese stuff, princess skye stuff and I hope some emails too. My email address is milky @ princessportal.com so please write to me! You can ask me about what my favourite anime is, how to make okonomiyaki or get me to investigate Princess’s sock draw. I look forward to hearing from you.

For today’s column I decided to introduce you to my neighbours. They live on the shelf below me and I can tell you its very crowded down there! I think there’s 23 of them now and they have pretty loud parties on the weekends.

They tell me they’ve ruled the toy box since Skye was a tiny little Princess. She never liked barbie dolls or anything like that but loved My Little Ponies. She only had a few back then, and used to always have a Queen and King pony who were her favourite two at the time. Of course she never actually had any boy ponies so one of them had to pretend. She built them a palace under her desk and they had many adventures. These days they don’t get up to so much, and there are some newcomers amoung them who look a bit different but they always seem to get along fine.

So they’re not as cute as Amigurumi, but I guess they’re a pretty special childhood memory for Skye. She still likes to go in to toy shops to see all the new ones. I hope she doesn’t get any more though, or I might have to find a new bookshelf…

Milky xoxo

This week when I went to the library I found so many books I wanted to read, that I couldn’t get them all out! I have already finished the first, Spinners by Donna Jo Napoli and Richard Tchen. It is a re-telling of the story of Rumpelstiltskin that is both humanizing and a little magical too.

Rumpelstiltskin is the tale of a young peasant girl, a millers daughter who spins fine yarn. So fine that her father is always boasting of her. One day he goes too far and boasts that she could spin straw in to gold, the king hears of this and commands the young girl spin a whole room full of straw in to gold for him, or she will die. A little dwarf comes to her in the night and promises to spin the straw in to gold if she will give him something, this happens for three consecutive nights. First she gives him her necklace, then her ring and finally she promises him her firstborn child. When the king decides to marry her and they have a child they do not want to give it up, so the dwarf sets one final task - to guess his name, which is of course, Rumpelstiltskin.

In Spinners there is no little dwarf, wicked and cruel, but a man. The Spinner lost the one he loved and was crippled in the process of trying to win her. In the end he just longs for human love and companionship. The young girl, who’s father boasts of her amazing talent, is still a victim of the story but she is resourceful and intelligent and kind. I was quite inspired by how she deals with all the hardships presented to her. It really is a beautiful retelling, though it makes for a sad story. Apparantly the author learnt to spin herself, so that she could make the tale as real as possible. I would love to read some of her other fairy tales too.