Orphaned at birth, Helena receives eight gifts from eight extraordinary aunts. Her gifts make her beautiful, intelligent, talented-as well as headstrong, temperamental, and bound to fulfill a destiny that involves death. Like Sleeping Beauty, Helena receives a final gift on the day of her sixteenth birthday . . . and, as a consequence, all in her domain are bespelled by sleep. A broken mirror becomes a portal to a dark day in a distant past that shattered the lives of her family and altered the future of an entire kingdom.

While the fate of the nation has been decided and cannot be undone, the fate of the family rests on a kiss, a fairy tale king, and what Helena will do when-and if-she wakes.