Have you ever wondered just what was going on when that odd little man with the long name stepped up and volunteered to spin straw into gold for the millers daughter? If you stop and think about it, there are some very peculiar and rather hard-to-explain components to the story. Vivian Vande Velde has wondered too, and shes come up with these six alternative versions of the old legend. A bevy of millers daughters confront their perilous situation in very different ways sometimes comic, sometimes scary. Most of the time, its the daughter who gets off safely, but sometimes, amazingly, Rumpelstiltskin himself wins the day. And in one tale, it is the king who cleverly escapes a quite unexpected fate.