Briar Rose

Another of the books we shared while traveling this summer was Jane Yolen's novella-length retelling of Briar Rose, a lovely mystery tale in which an adult granddaughter pieces together the story her grandmother used to tell with what turns out to be her grandmother's untold Holocaust story.

As in all good fairy tales, the elements of the story all turn out to be true in some way. The grandmother really was a princess. She really was put under a spell and then woke up. She was rescued by a prince. But that's only the surface of the story. Part of the reason the grandmother kept retelling the story throughout her life is that it has depths, and every time she tells another part, her granddaughters understand more, especially when they ask questions. For instance, when the prince comes, he
"sang, too, and as he added his voice to theirs, it was as if he witnessed all their deaths in the thorns. It was as if he had knowledge of all their lives, past and present and future....
How can they have any future lives if they're dead?....
The future is when people talk about the past. So if the prince knows all their past lives and tells all the people who are still to come, then the princes live again and into the future."

The charm of this tale is in the way it unfolds, bit by fragile bit, until you understand how all the pieces fit together, better even than the grandmother ever understood it herself. And also in the way the story is continued by the granddaughter as she comes to understand the courage of the heroes, who are "all sleeping princesses some time" but know "it is better to be fully awake."

This is not a bed-time story. It is a story to make you come fully awake, not because of lurid horrors--it's not that kind of Holocaust tale--but because you'll see more if you make your way through life with your eyes opened.

Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast

I love it when one story gets tangled up with another. When our children were small, Ron liked to ask them what would happen when Dumbo met Colonel Hathi, or point out that the voice of Winnie the Pooh is the same as the voice of Kaa. (Actually, he did make some non-Jungle Book comparisons, but those are the ones we all remember best.)

So when I went to the library and found Jane Yolen's short story collection entitled Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast, I had to check it out. I mean, really! Twelve? Of course, that's the number of stories. But it does seem like a challenge to the Red Queen's boast:
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(Update: perusing Yolen's journal led me to discover a book blog called Seven Impossible Things.)

I have to agree with Walker, who also read this one, that the best story is "Wilding." It's about the new Central Park sport of the future, in which people can turn into animals for a little fun because "wilding is a pure New York sport." Evidently, some things never change, because there is still danger in Central Park, even though Wilding is legal and there are safeguards. The most fun one is the existence of "Maxes" who are there to "control the Wild Things....It's an old story."

Our second favorite is "Lost Girls," in which a girl goes to Neverland and fosters a rebellion among the Wendys, who are stuck cleaning up the table and dishes after every food-fighting feast in which the Lost Boys indulge. That one reminds me of the Emily Dickinson poem:
Tell all the truth, but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--

The whole idea of retelling the story from a new "Wendy's" point of view makes me think of "telling it slant," of course, but the idea of the dazzling truth is in the story too, especially the part Walker and I both remembered best and commented on to each other, when Peter looks at the new Wendy, who is insisting that her name is Darla, and "there was nothing nice or laughing or young about his eyes. They were dark and cold and very very old." Yes, and the pirates turn out to be more authentically egalitarian in this version of the story, too.

My other favorite is a vampire story, but unlike any other I've ever read, entitled Mama Gone. It's a brief story, but emotionally effective, and before reading it I would have said that was impossible.

It wasn't one of my favorites, but there's also a version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff in this collection too, told by the bridge. Do you like it when stories are related to each other?

How Modern These Faeries Be

Ironside, by Holly Black, is subtitled "A Modern Faery's Tale," like the two volumes that precede it (Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale and Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie). The modernization is interesting and amusing; it only occasionally fails to be true to the tradition of fairy stories.

Ironside is well plotted and a fast read. Although I can imagine someone enjoying it without reading the first two, a big part of its pleasure is how well it weaves threads from the previous stories. In Tithe, Holly Black introduces her characters and brings their first adventure to a full and satisfying close. In Valiant, she introduces different characters and tells what seems to be a separate story, but it is not as compelling and doesn't come to a satisfactory end. The third book demonstrates that these stories are meant to work as a trilogy.

The faeries are as heartless and beautiful and compelling as traditional fairies should be, with an additional layer of appealing-to-teenagers coolness, a la Jane Yolen's updated fairy tales (Pay the Piper is the latest one I've read). They're clever, too, although this is the main area in which the updating falls short. It's amusing when Corny the mortal boy says, in Tithe, "I woke up outside the hill this morning. I figured that you'd ditched me and I was going to do a Rip Van Winkle and find out that it was the year 2112 and no one had even heard of me," but why didn't it happen? How can he also eat the fairy food and be able to return to the moral world with no problems (other than an isolated vomiting episode in Ironside). Black attempts to explain a little of how her modern magic works in Valiant, with the plotline about "never," an addictive-to-humans faery glamour tonic, but it all seems a little easier than usual for the mortals to overcome the magic of the fairy realm.

There's a lovely bit of traditional fairy trickery in Tithe, when Roiben is ordered to seize Kaye and "he grabbed her hair in a clump, jerking her head back, then just as suddenly let her go" because he hasn't been ordered to hold on, but this isn't developed any further in Ironside. In fact, the final play on words is so funny and infuriating that it made me scream with laughter and kick the book across the floor in annoyance. Luckily, that bit of trickery is not integral to the plot; it's just a revelation after the action has already taken place.

What is clever about the ending of Ironside is the way the heroine saves herself. She needs the hero's help and he needs hers, but the actual saving of her own skin is up to her. There's no cheap ending where anything is resolved by magic. There's no easy happily ever after. The ending isn't as tidy as it could have been. Early on, my daughter and I were both amused by this dialogue:
"You can't date the Lord of the Night Court."
"Well, I'm not. He dumped me."
"You can't get dumped by the Lord of the Night Court."
"Oh yes you can. You so completely can."
And despite various annoying (to me, anyway) descriptions of this Lord's black leather outfits for going out into the mortal world, the ending of the book is letter-perfect in its blend of traditional and modern:
Kaye groaned. "You really are a terrible boyfriend, you know that?"
He nodded. "A surfeit of ballads makes for odd ideas about romance."
"But things don't work like that," Kaye said, taking the bottle from his hand and drinking from the neck. "Like ballads or songs or epic poems where people do all the wrong things for the right reasons."
"You have completed an impossible quest and saved me from the Queen of the Faeries," he said softly. "That is very like a ballad."

An additional pleasure of reading these books is the epigraph for each chapter, drawn eclectically from the writings of people like Pablo Neruda, Andrew Wyeth, Oscar Wilde, Christina Rossetti, and Czeslaw Milosz. Some of them might even interest young readers in casting their net wider, as Cornelia Funke's epigraphs drawn from the writing of Michael de Larrabeiti for her chapters in Inkheart caused my family to seek out and enjoy The Borrible trilogy.