Tag: Fairy Tales

Through the Wardrobe

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews8 Comments

Narnia has been coming up a lot for me lately.  I went to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader…my book club book pick was inspired by Narnia…the series was referenced on a blog I follow…  I decided the universe was telling me something (and that book club book especially made me want to go back to the original) and I decided to re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis.

I say “re-read” because I know I read it before, but I honestly couldn’t tell you how long ago it was.  Years and years, although the story is so familiar that in some ways it doesn’t feel that long.  For those who somehow don’t know the story (side-note–I once overheard a woman tell a librarian she’d never heard of the series, so it’s possible), it’s the story of four children who go through a wardrobe and find themselves in the magical country of Narnia.  There they meet the great lion Aslan and fight an epic battle against the White Witch.

It’s a wonderful story on many levels.  It’s a lovely children’s fantasy with dashing heroes, not too much blood, magical creatures like Mr. Tumnus and Mr. and Mrs Badger, and several stern admonitions that it’s very foolish to shut oneself inside of a wardrobe (I honestly think Lewis was worried about this, he repeats it so many times).  On a more symbolic level, there’s a clear Christ story enacted.  But it works on both levels, for however you want to take it.  I’ve always thought that was the mark of the best kind of book–a good story and a good message where neither one gets in the way of the other.

I enjoyed Lewis’ style very much.  Things happen so quickly.  Lucy, the first child into Narnia, gets there by page six.  As the adventures continue, they go on at a tumblingly-quick rate.  There’s even a point where Lewis writes, of an unpleasant night journey by sledge, “This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.”  Thankfully, he doesn’t bother, concluding, “But I will skip on to the time when the snow had stopped and the morning had come and they were racing along in the daylight.”

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were in the same writing group.  I’ve heard that Tolkien spent years and years on The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a matter of weeks (something that I’ve also heard annoyed Tolkien no end).  I have to say, it shows for both of them.  Different viewpoints on writing could consider that a plus or a minus to either one, but my preference would have to be with Lewis.

Lewis begins the book with a lovely dedication to his goddaughter, the real-life Lucy.  In somewhat contradiction to the story that he wrote the book in a few weeks, he says that he wrote it for her but she grew up faster than it did and she’s now too old for it, “but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”  Lewis clearly understood about the cross-age appeal of the best children’s stories.  We may go through an age where we think we’re too grown-up for “kids books,” but eventually we get old enough to realize we can come back to them.

St. Paul wrote, “When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11).  C. S. Lewis added, “Including the fear of being thought childish.”  We don’t have to “think like a child or reason like a child” (paraphrasing Corinthians) to appreciate a story written for children.  We can enjoy it with new eyes, new understanding, and hopefully some of the old magic too.

Ordinary–But Charming

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews1 Comment

I’ve read several books about ordinary princesses.  The danger is that ordinary can sometimes be only half a step from boring, and when you set out to make your heroine ordinary, you sometimes end up with a heroine who is so very ordinary that she’s not at all interesting or distinctive.  But, on the other hand, sometimes it works.  There’s nothing at all boring about Amy in The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye.

I have to love a book that begins “Long and long ago, when Oberon was king of the fairies, there reigned over the fair country of Phantasmorania a monarch who had six beautiful daughters.”

Amy is born seventh, and is cursed–or blessed?–at her christening by a fairy to be ordinary.  Unlike her blonde-haired, blue-eyed and breathtakingly beautiful sisters, Amy has mousy brown-hair and a turned-up nose, is not the least bit graceful, and is, well, ordinary.  But she knows how to climb down the wisteria vine growing by her window and go off into the forest to climb trees and make friends with squirrels, and she has a wonderful practical bent.  Of one of her sisters’ suitors, she thinks, “He may be very good-looking, but I’m quite sure he has never giggled one good giggle in his life!”

When Amy’s turn comes to get married, the royal family is at an utter loss to find an interested prince, so they decide the solution is to bring in a dragon.  That will of course tempt some prince to come kill it, and then he’ll have to marry the princess.  Not wanting a dragon to lay waste to the country, Amy decides to run away.

She goes on to have quite ordinary adventures, in the forest and later as a kitchen maid at another castle, where she falls in love with a man-of-all-work.  They’re ordinary adventures in the most charming way.  The writing is very good, and Amy is a sweet and endearing heroine.  She somehow seems utterly unlike a lot of the brown-haired, tom-boyish, clumsy “ordinary princesses” that populate other books of this sort, even though point by point she has a lot in common with them.  Maybe it’s simply better writing.

I love practical, pragmatic, humorous stories loosely inspired by fairy tales, and this one’s a favorite.

A Magical Retelling of Cinderella

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews6 Comments

When I reviewed Ella Enchanted, I said it was “one of the best retellings of Cinderella I’d ever read.”  There was actually a very specific reason I didn’t just say it was the best retelling.  That reason is Silver Woven in My Hair by Shirley Rousseau Murphy.

I read this originally from the library when I was…maybe nine?  I don’t really remember.  Young.  I read it several times, and then it somehow disappeared off the shelf.  But miraculously, I remembered the title.  I usually don’t.  I usually remember something like, there was a bit in there where the girl is watching the royal family come back from the island and she sees the goatherd, and then she invites him into the kitchen at the inn to have dinner and it makes her stepfamily mad but he just laughs so it’s all right…oh and then they had a picnic later on in the book, and there was that really good part about the owner of the sword.

And that’s not going to help anyone find the story they’re looking for.  But fortunately I remembered the title, and by the time I was in high school the wonderful world of online booksellers existed and I was able to buy Silver Woven in My Hair for my very own, and I spent an entire afternoon rereading the whole book.  It was lovely.

It’s one of the best retellings of Cinderella I’ve ever read.  It’s a story about Thursey, and her terrible stepfamily.  The royal family was coming back from that island because they were there while the queen and the prince recovered from being captured in a war.  Thursey’s father went to the war and never came back, so this Cinderella actually has a reason to stay where she is–even though she knows he’s probably never coming back, she can’t bring herself to leave, just in case.

Thursey doesn’t have a sparkly fairy godmother, but she does have friends who want to help her go to the ball at the palace.  There’s Anwin the monk, and there’s Gillie the goatherd, who’s funny and charming–and pretty far from a sparkly fairy godmother.  🙂

One part of the story I love is that Thursey is a Cinderella who loves Cinderella stories.  Her family runs an inn, and she collects stories from the travelers who pass through–all the different Cinderella stories from different cultures, Cendrillon and Aschenputtel and Catkin and so on.  Even though Thursey’s life isn’t very good, she never stops dreaming.  The ball is one aspect of the story, but Thursey’s dreams have a lot more substance than dancing a single night at a ball.

The characters, from Thursey to Gillie to the nasty stepfamily, are well-drawn and life-like.  The story is very grounded in reality, in a practical world where dishes have to be washed and goats have to be fed and there’s none of the impossible and imcomprehensible leaps that the original fairy tales often make.  Yet there’s also something whimsical about the tale.  For some reason the word “gossamer” keeps coming to mind, and I think it has to do with the writing style.  Murphy has kept some of the poetry of the old tales, while giving us characters and a plot that are more tangible.

Silver Woven in My Hair isn’t exactly a fantasy…or it could be.  Murphy leaves it up to the reader to decide whether some elements are really magic or not, and I’m not entirely sure what I think.

But even if you decide it’s not a fantasy, it’s definitely a magical story.  And a marvelous tale.

A Multiplicity of Jacks, and One Tom

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, Juvenile, Reviews1 Comment

I really, really wanted to love The Secret History of Tom Trueheart by Ian Beck.  But I didn’t.  My feelings were much more mixed.

I really do love the premise.  Tom has six older brothers named Jack, who all go on adventures in the Land of Stories.  How fun is that?  First, the idea that you can walk through a gate and enter a magical land where fairy tales happen to you, and that there’s a family where they have this tradition of going off on adventures…love it!  And I love the idea of gently poking fun at the way fairy tale heroes (non-princes, at least) are always named Jack.

Tom is the youngest (making him the seventh son–very fairy tale proper, that) and the smallest, and he’s convinced that he’s the least brave.  He’s the only one who hasn’t gone off on adventures, but when all his older brothers mysteriously disappear, then it’s up to him to find out what happened.  I’m not going to try to claim that that’s terribly original, but it’s from the children’s section, and I like stories about characters who don’t think they’re brave and have to find qualities in themselves they didn’t know they had in order to save the day.

So far we’re doing great.  But.  (And you knew this was coming.)  But…we have to read what happened to go wrong with each Jack.  And we have to read what happens when Tom ultimately helps them.  Don’t forget, the Jacks are in the Land of Story to embark on fairy tales.  So what this ultimately turns into is a lot of retelling of fairy tales.

We get the first half early on in the story: Jack gets halfway into Sleeping Beauty’s castle (or whatever) and gets into some kind of trouble.  The book goes on, Tom has his adventure, we come back later, and Tom helps Jack rescue the princess.  (Sorry if that was a spoiler, but I doubt it surprised anyone).  The trouble is, nothing all that original happens to the fairy tale itself.  Tom is thrown into it, but it’s not really that different.

Tom’s story is original, when we’re following him, but when we’ve also got six Jacks to get through, I felt like I spent way too much of the book just reading stories I already knew.  This might have been better with about half as many Jacks, and only half as many fairy tales.

That points directly to my other problem: while I love that idea of six characters named Jack, they do run together.  Beck tried to distinguish them, by giving them all a nickname like Jacques or Jackson or Jake, but I was still getting them mixed up.  I’m not very good with character names though, so that might just be me.

Like I said, I have mixed feelings on this book.  I love the premise.  However, I’d only recommend reading it if you’re also in the mood to reread the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, because that’s more or less what you end up doing, in between Tom’s adventure.

I recently found out there are two sequels, and since the premise is so good, I just might investigate them.

Author’s site: http://tomtrueheart.com/

The Curse Strikes

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fiction FridayLeave a comment

This week for Fiction Friday, I thought I’d share another excerpt from The People the Fairies Forget, my young adult fantasy novel.  You can read a little about the premise here, and catch up with previous excerpts here and here.

            In brief, the story so far: Princess Rosaline was cursed by the Evil Fairy Echinacea at her christening to prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die.  Good Fairy Marjoram transformed the death curse into a spell for enchanted sleep until awakened by a kiss.  Tarragon (a free agent fairy unaffiliated with either group, and our narrator) thinks the whole thing is kind of stupid.  He also has a wager on with Marj about whether True Love can be found among non-royalty; he says yes and she says no.  He’s chosen a goatherd named Jack and a kitchenmaid named Emmy, who works at Rosaline’s castle, to prove his point, although the details of how this will be demonstrated have yet to be revealed to the reader.

            As we join, Rosaline has just pricked her finger.  Marj, out of deep concern that Rosaline will be lonely if she wakes up in a hundred years and everyone else is gone, has put the rest of the castle to sleep too.  Tarry has seen to it that Jack and his herd of goats, including the Little One, a baby goat, have come to the castle to investigate.

*********************************

           When we arrived at the main entrance to the castle, Jack stopped short to stare at the yards and yards and yards of thorns.

            The area around the castle was by no means deserted.  A considerable crowd had gathered already, and more were arriving.  Many looked on with eager curiosity and loudly theorized regarding what had happened—they were plainly onlookers, come to see the excitement.  Others, the ones who appeared more distressed, had to be friends and relatives of the people inside.  Marj should’ve seen what she’d caused.  But she wasn’t there, of course.

            The goats settled in and started eating the lawn.  Jack eyed the thorns.  They weren’t just thorns.  Marj would never dream of magicking up something that plain and ugly, so she’d made enchanted roses instead. There were roses swarming all over the outer wall of the castle and spreading at least three hundred feet out into the fields in a tangled mass far above our heads.  They had vivid red blossoms and sharp thorns.

            Jack scratched the Little One’s head, and stared at the roses.  “I have to get through there.  How am I going to get through there?”

Continue reading “The Curse Strikes” →