2 posts tagged “fairy tales”
I just finished The Stolen Child, which is essentially a fairy tale about changelings. It is beautifully written, but overwhelmingly sad. The Amazon.com synopsis reads:
From Publishers Weekly
Folk legends of the changeling serve as a touchstone for Donohue's haunting debut, set vaguely in the American northeast, about the maturation of a young man troubled by questions of identity. At age seven, Henry Day is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced by a look-alike impostor. In alternating chapters, each Henry relates the tale of how he adjusts to his new situation. Human Henry learns to run with his hobgoblin pack, who never age but rarely seem more fey than a gang of runaway teens. Hobgoblin Henry develops his uncanny talent for mimicry into a music career and settles into an otherwise unremarkable human life. Neither Henry feels entirely comfortable with his existence, and the pathos of their losses influences all of their relationships and experiences. Inevitably, their struggles to retrieve their increasingly forgotten pasts put them on paths that intersect decades later. Donohue keeps the fantasy as understated as the emotions of his characters, while they work through their respective growing pains. The result is an impressive novel of outsiders whose feelings of alienation are more natural than supernatural.
This, like The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, is one of those fairy tales that takes awhile to fully digest. It has several rather haunting themes, the one that stood out to me the most being, how well can a parent ever know their child?. The story is extremely well written and switches back and forth in perspective from the changeling who becomes Henry Day, to the child who becomes a changeling. The changeling Henry Day ages like a normal human, but the original Henry Day, stolen away from his human life, remains eternally seven years old, although he would have been in his thirties at the end of the book. As the changeling settles into life as Henry Day, the seven-year-old child he was becomes remarkably more mature than his now-human counterpart in many ways.
I loved this book. It took me a few chapters to get into it - the changeling who becomes Henry Day starts out as quite a snotty little brat - but the narrative sucks you in, and you can't help but try to figure out how it will be resolved in the end. It was not the ending I expected, and I think the book is richer for that. I would definitely recommend this book - it is dark and poignant, but uplifting in that it is a story extremely well-told.
I love fairy tales, particularly the original versions where the bad children get eaten by monsters in the Black Forest and no one ends up living happily-ever-after. I used to spend hours reading my mother's childhood fairy tale books, which were quite a bit darker than the ones I had, and I used to read my grandmother's 1920's Oz books, which were also surprisingly creepy (one character, I remember, was cut in half lengthwise and had to walk around like that). So this book, which is more or less pitched as a dark fairy tale, sounded good to me.
I would have to say that this is one of the absolute best stories I've ever read. It's extremely dark, and is an allegory for adult life. But most of all, it captures exactly what it's like to be in the "in-between" years of being not quite a child or a teenager. In this case, it is set in 1940's Britain, so there is the added drama of WWII as well as the time period making it believable that a twelve-year-old is still fairly innocent.
Here is the synopsis from Amazon:
High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother. He is angry and alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in his imagination, he finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a land that is a strange reflection of his own world, populated by heroes and monsters, and ruled over by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book... The Book of Lost Things.
Although parts of this book were predictable, as all fairy tales can be, it never descended into the trite or sappy. The ending, for example, was absolutely perfect - one of those stories where you shut the book and the story stays with you for days. It is bittersweet, but incredibly well done. I love Connolly's writing style, and I will definitely be checking out his other works now. I highly recommend The Book of Lost Things, and will be putting it on my wishlist to remind myself to pick up my own copy.
