Black Swan, White Raven - Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling (Eds)

Black Swan, White Raven is Datlow and Windling’s fourth collection of once-familiar and much-beloved bedtime stories reimagined by some of the finest fantasists currently plying their literary trade—acclaimed writers like Jane Yolen, John Crowley, Michael Cadnum, and Joyce Carol Oates, who give new lives and new meanings to the plights of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel, and more.

Hansel and Gretel make several appearances here, not the least being at their trial for the murder of a supposedly helpless old woman. The shocking real reason for Snow White’s desperate flight from her home is revealed in “The True Story,” and the steadfast tin soldier, made flesh and blood, pays a terrible price for his love and devotion.

The stories and poems in this collection run the gamut from triumphant to troubling to utterly outrageous.... All in all, the reimagined fairy tales and fables in Datlow and Windling’s literary offering mine the fantastical yarns we loved as children for new and darker gold.

I always find it difficult to summarize short story collections, so the above is from the publisher's site. I didn't actually realize, until I started to read some of the author biographies, that this is a reprint of an older anthology (originally published in 1997). Though the stories are older, the nice thing about them being based on fairy tales, is that they don't feel dated in ways that contemporary realism or even speculative fiction sometimes can.

 As with many short story anthologies, the overall collection (though linked together in a very general way) feels uneven. While some of the veterans were fantastic in their storytelling capabilities--Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Yolen, etc.--a number of the stories felt not quite finished, or at least in need of one more polish to make them truly fantastic. This is not to say that any of the stories were bad, per se, but only that there was some need for more editing, in my opinion.

 Fractured and retold fairy tales are always going to be popular, as the whole point of fairy tales is that they change over time in different cultural and historical contexts. This means that the stories are able to adapt well to contemporary situations and give us food for thought even as the basis for the different tales remain the same. A sleeping beauty who ends up in the fashion, industry gives us the older framework, but allows the writer to explore new ways of understanding body image, love, relationships, and the disturbing world of fashion and celebrity.

 Even though the stories are somewhat uneven overall, the whole collection is still worth reading, giving some of the tales a breath of fresh air and new life for fans of the genre.

Recommended

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Living - Matt De La Peña

Image
The Living  recently received an Honor from the Pura Belpré committee. The award recognizes of a work which best portrays the Latino cultural experience in a work of literature for children or youth. As I was at the awards announcements, and having known people who served on the committee in the past, I was intrigued. I had read the winning title and the other honor titles, and was impressed with the choices. So here's my review of The Living : The novel begins with Shy, a young guy working for a snazzy cruise line, offering water to people on the Lido Deck of the ship to combat the heat. Everything is going pretty well until an older gentleman comes out and starts spouting of weird, disconcerting phrases: "You have seen the face of evil."Shy doesn't quite know what to think, so he moves on to a couple of ladies on the other side of the deck. Just as he's handing them their water bottles, he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and realizes the old guy h
Read more

The Music of What Happens - Bill Konigsberg

Image
Max: Chill. Sports. Video games. Gay and not a big deal, not to him, not to his mom, not to his buddies. And a secret: An encounter with an older kid that makes it hard to breathe, one that he doesn't want to think about, ever. Jordan: The opposite of chill. Poetry. His "wives" and the Chandler Mall. Never been kissed and searching for Mr. Right, who probably won't like him anyway. And a secret: A spiraling out of control mother, and the knowledge that he's the only one who can keep the family from falling apart. Over the course of one summer, two boys will have to face their biggest fears and decide what they're willing to risk -- to get the thing they want the most. This is a phenomenal book, in my humble opinion. There aren't too many books dealing with male sexual abuse, particularly in YA. Sex and sexuality are messy parts of young adulthood, but what this book does really well is discuss consent and the ways in which physical cues can be misinte
Read more

Girls Like Us - Gail Giles

Image
I have now gone out and made sure that I have all of the books longlisted for the National Book Award. I read and reviewed a number of these previously, so now I have five left to read and review. This is one of those five (but would I expect anything less from the fabulous team at Candlewick?) Girls Like Us  is a unique novel in a number of respects, most notably in the fact that both protagonists are identified (and self-identified) as mentally disabled in some way. Biddy has a learning disability that she was born with, while Quincy is a young girl who is disabled due to the fact that her mother's boyfriend hit her in the head with a brick, disfiguring her and damaging her brain. Once the two girls graduate from school, they move into a house together, becoming caregivers for both each other and an older woman, Elizabeth. The two must rely on each other for comfort, knowledge, and emotional strength, and Elizabeth manages to help them along the way. While I had moments of wo
Read more