Out of the dark woods...

Hello!  This last semester was...ah...intensive.  The lack of updates here reflected that.  oops.

Anyway!  To celebrate the fact that I have free time again (oh, hey summer full of events and cons and ohgodneedtocatchupongodseeker) ok I lied.  I still don't have free time.  But!  I read some things!  YOU SHOULD READ THEM TOO.


Seriously fairy tale fans.  If you have not picked up one or both of the books I will be reviewing in the next few weeks, I judge you.


They are both by the same person: the lovely Catherine Valente.  She is awesome and reads her stuff awesome and will be in MN in less than three weeks and I will have to make sure I don't embarrass myself by fansqueeing all over her.

*cough* like i almost did at WisCon where I couldn't think of anything to say except "you write words good!" *cough*

First Review!

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland 

in a Ship of Her Own Making

Look at this book!  Its SO PRETTY!

 See that book?  Yeah.  I thought so.  This book is a really good book.  Also!  It is a really well crafted fairytale.  

This makes two things that I love, and they are all in one book.  

I bet you want to hear what about it makes it so good.  You want me to prove my assertions, don't you?

I can do this thing.  You see, the main character, September, is a little girl who is (like any good fairytale hero/ine) a bit bored by her life.  She doesn't care about washing tea cups and her parents aren't there--her father is off fighting in WWII and her mother works in a factory building planes.  September herself is "ill-tempered and irascible" and gets herself whisked off to fairyland by the Green Wind and a flying Leopard.  Fairyland is ruled by a Marquess who is terrible, but has a very fine hat.

September befriends a Wyvern who is half library on his father's side (named A through L), and he is awesome.  September will have adventures, lose her heart, save fairyland, confront death, fall in love and break the rules.

It is also a book about love and obsession and heart break.  It is a book about your heart's desire and being bound by rules and oaths and pain, but also joy and love and pleasure.  It is a book about loyalty and betrayal, and what you leave behind.  it is a book that allows itself to re-examine modern bureaucracy and how imagination gets left behind under rules and doubts.

Fairyland (and everything Valente has written that I've read, if I'm being honest) is beautifully written and at times it approaches lyrical prose.  I'll admit to being a bit wary of this sort of thing usually--the reader can end up feeling cheated by the world suddenly acting out of character or magic being introduced in such a way that makes the reader question what is real and what is not real and if the magic is supposed to be metaphorical or not and getting distracted by how the world works and why the author can't just come out and say what the hell is going on.  Or the lyrical prose ends up being pretty, but distracts from the story and gives the impression that the words and the author are the main attractions to the book instead of the plot and the characters and the story.  (Don't get me wrong, I can totally enjoy books like that--but if I'm reading for the story, I'd better not get the impression that the author cares more about sounding pretty then giving me a good tale, and I certainly don't much care for being surprised by it.)

Fairyland, I'm glad to say, does not fall into that trap.  It adheres to the fairytale logic and the rich world firmly (and consistently!), so the reader never feels like the book is cheating.  The narrator is allowed to be a character and the lyrical nature of the work adds to, rather than distracts from, the plot and the story.  The style is playful but takes the book and the dangers seriously, and feels like a mysterious stranger telling you a tale around a campfire in the dark woods.  I really want the audio book of this one, and failing that, I want to read it out loud.

There are references to other works--fairytales from all over the world, modern genre fantasy, Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (another book you need to read!), Alice in Wonderland, the Oz books, and probably many, many others I didn't catch on my first read through.  Valente's Fairyland is dark, misleading, a shattered mirror image of our own, and full of wonderful lies and truths and logic and illogic.  Its funny and heart-wrenching and thrilling and YOU SHOULD READ IT NOW.

Ah.  I'm back to the fansqueeing, aren't I?

I'm sorry.  No, not really.  I want you to read it and then come back and talk to me about it so that we can go "and I loved that part!"  "and when she did that thing?!"  and "did you see what Valente did with the shoe bit?"  and then we will flail and devolve into quoting and you will want to hear it out loud like me.


So, fairytale fans, Alice fans, Oz fans, Rushdie fans: READ THIS BOOK, no buts, ifs or anything.  I do not think you will be disappointed.



Next Review will be Deathless by Catherine Valente.

A hint:  This book is the Koschei Tale set in communist Russia.  It has Baba Yaga.

I think you can guess how I felt about that book.  If you think I was incoherent with joy at this one you should have heard me reading Deathless.  I will try to make the next post more then BABA YAGA! KOSCHEI!  EEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!  *flail until falling over like Foaming-at-the-mouth-guy from Avatar the Last Airbender (TV show, NOT THE HORRIBLE MOVIE)* 

Edited to add: This Guy:

But no promises.  You have been warned.

YOU GUYS!

I'm speechless here, and mostly just being all flail-ly and squeaking.

This is what Russian fairy tales feel like!
Russian fairy tales, illustrated awesomely.

See?  This is awesome.  Go to Yana Moskaluk's page!  Tell her to do more fairy tales!  Give her moneys!  I WANT A PRINT!  I WANT ALL THE PRINTS!

Ahem.  I may be in need of more sleep.

:)

Story Time!

           Sit down, reader, and I'll tell you a story...

            Fairy tales come from an oral tradition—these stories have been told and re-told in different languages and by different people, all putting their own words onto older stories.  So, here is one of my favorites of Grimm’s tales, in my own words—A warning; it is ridiculous.  It makes very little sense.  It is a dumb story.  I really, really love it for no good reason.

The Boy Who Could Not Shudder

            Once upon a time, there lived a small family with only one son, who was considered a little bit dense—and he was, make no mistake about that.  He was also very unhappy, for he had always heard people tell of how this story made them shudder, or how the dark made them shudder, and he had never felt that way which upset him because it sounded like fun, I guess.  He just could not shudder or feel fear.  He whined about it so much to his parents that they eventually told him to go out into the world and learn to shudder so that he would finally shut up about it.

            So he did.  He has many terrifying adventures that he is unfazed by—he sleeps under a hangman’s tree full of dead people, and crawling with demons and then when the dead start to moan and curse him he…asks them to shut up so he can sleep.  When he is captured by bandits, he whines to them about not being able to fear, they decide to try to frighten him by showing off the heads of those they have killed.  He just sighs and tells them it’s no use, tries to leave, and has to fight them all.  Which he does.  I suppose that if you are going to be a whiny moron it is good to be able to fight well.

            He ends up all alone in a tavern full of dead people, bemoaning his sad fate of not being able to fear anything when the last person left alive tells him that there is a nearby castle, haunted by Hell itself.  If he can last a whole night there, the castle will be freed and, it’s said, the hero will marry the princess and become a king.  I suspect the bandit just wanted to get on with dying in peace.

            Well, the idiot basically says “oh fiiine.  At least if I can’t shudder I’ll be doing something useful.”  So he goes to the castle and prepares to spend the night.  The original story spends a great deal of time on the gruesome and fearful events of that night, demons eating the flesh of humans (“no thanks, I’ve got some bread of my own,” says our fearless nincompoop), and playing “ninepins” with human skulls and femurs.  Our hapless hero is very good at ninepins and has a grand old time gambling with demons and winning and never feeling any fear at all, and being grumpy about that fact.  Well, dawn comes, he hasn’t run off or become mad—so the curse is broken and he marries the princess.

            You’d think he would be satisfied, but…no. He spends the first year of his marriage to the princess complaining about how he still never learned to shudder.  One day, after she got fed up with it, she dumps a bucket of cold water on him.

            He exclaims, “Oh! That’s so cold I’m shuddering!”  (Seriously. He really says that.)  And he realizes that he can shudder.

            And then he lives happily ever after.

            Hahahaha.  Seriously, I can make the case that a lot of fairy tales originally had a purpose, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what that one was there for.  There is a pretty good rendition of that one in the Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. 

BTW:  If you have not seen this series DO EEEET.   I mean, you really can't go wrong.  Greek myths! Fairy tales! Muppets!  If you have Netflix, it is available streaming online.  I'll do a full review at some point, but until then, check it out!

Welcome to my world!

     Once upon a time, a young girl who loved books a little too much discovered a forgotten shelf in the back of her middle school library with oversized, strange books that each had a color in the title.  The Big (pick-a-color) Book of Fairy Tales.  She liked the color Green, so she picked up the Big Green Book of Fairy Tales and went home with it.  There were some familiar stories, to be sure, but there were many more that weren’t. When she was finished, she read the Red book, and the Fuchsia book and the Blue book, until she had read all of the books on that shelf. Fairy tales, before the big green book, were stories that ended happily, and were mostly animated bits of fluff and music.  Now, they included non-endings, dark, frightening woods, and terrible revenges—and she started to notice patterns in the stories that echoed through to her beloved modern books.

            She could not help but notice that the tales in those books, while never actually repeated, were often retellings and adaptations of each other across cultural boundaries. She started thinking about the whys of these tales, why these stories were able to adapt to new cultures and travel around picking up bits and pieces as they went.  She began to ponder the why of the fairy tale archetypal characters, and look for them in the rest of her media consumption.  She noticed that the characters that populate fairy tales are characters that are pretty dang universal across the world, from Africa to England, Asia to North and South America. 

            The Fool, the Crone, the Priest/Shaman/Monk, the Princess, the Prince/Warrior, and the Absent Mother.

*** ***

            Good story, yes?  It may not be as obvious as I would make it in a fairy tale of my own, so here’s the deal.  I’m that girl.  And I love fairy tales. I love their absurdity, the matter-of-fact way they dump strange people and places on the reader and just assume the reader will go along with it.  I love the way modern movies and stories all use the same archetypes, even when they don’t mean to.   I love the way these stories are adaptable and fluid and move from culture to culture, era to era.  I love that these stories have probably been around as long as we’ve had people telling stories—and as far as I can tell, that means we’ve been telling them as long as we’ve been people.  I even love the bizarre and arbitrary way we separate Myth from Fairy Tale and Fable.  I love that I can find a story that we Americans would call a “Cinderella” story in just about every country.  I love the fact that Cap ‘O Rushes became King Lear, which then became Ran, a samurai movie by Kurasawa. 

            I love fairy tales because they speak to me about Story as a concept, rather than a thing.  Fairy tales tend to be simplified stories—all plot, no character development, no explanation.  They become, in this way, our archetypal stories, and we tell them a million different ways.

            I seek out these modern retellings, authors who play with the characters and clichés and conventions.  I love Disney movies, I am fascinated at the way they needed to trim and lighten fairy tales for modern audiences and how those re-tellings have completely altered the way most folk think about those old tales. 

            This blog then, is a place for me to explore my thoughts on fairytales and story and flail about excitedly (and hopefully coherently) so that my wife doesn’t have to listen to me ramble at her as much about what makes Baba Yaga SO FUCKING COOL.  I’ll tell you stories about what fairytales mean to me, and I’ll tell you the old tales that you may or may not have heard. 

I will probably swear, and I won’t shy away from the gruesome aspects of fairytales—I may, in fact, actually focus on them from time to time—I think it is interesting the way these tales have been sanitized and cleaned up for modern consumption.  So, consider this your fair warning—this blog is probably not for kids or people who get extremely concerned about bad language.

            Have fun, stick around, keep a bowl of popcorn ready, and settle in!  Story time!