Fairy Tales Reviews

Ice

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Would you risk everything for a fairy tale? Cassie was a young girl growing up in an Arctic research station. Her grandmother used to tell her stories about Cassie’s mother, the daughter of the North Wind. The story went like this:

When the North Wind wanted a daughter he asked the Polar Bear King to kidnap for him a child. In return the North Wind promised his new daughter in marriage to the Polar Bear King. Before she came of age she met a human man and fell in love with him. When the Polar Bear King came to claim her it was to find her heart already belonged to another. The daughter of the North Wind asked him to hide her and her human love from her father and in return she would give him their first born daughter as a wife. The Polar Bear King hid them in snow and ice but it wasn’t enough. The North Wind found her when the cries from her new born was heard by one of his brothers. He came and whisked her away to a Troll Castle and she was never seen again.

Now that Cassie is grown up she realizes that her grandmother’s story was just a nice way of telling her that her mother was dead. She lives in the real world now, working at her father’s Arctic research station. She is a very literal minded aspiring scientist and is very passionate about her work tagging and tracking polar bears as part of her father’s research. On the night of her eighteenth birthday she stumbles across the largest polar bear she has ever seen. Her attempts to tag it come to naught as the bear actually seems to dissolve into a wall of ice. She breaks protocol and attempts to track the bear for hours only to return to the station defeated. When she tells her father of meeting the bear he freaks out, but not for the reasons she expects. All of a sudden he wants to send her to Anchorage. Now. Before it’s too late. It turns out her father and grandmother actually believe the fairy tale she was told in childhood is true and that the Polar Bear King has come to claim her as his bride. Thinking her family has gone insane she sneaks out to try and tag the bear again to prove it is just a bear once and for all, only to have him appear before her, and start to speak…

The Return of the Light

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In The Return of the Light Carolyn McVickar Edwards assembles twelve legends, folktales and fairy tales told about the “return of light” that occurs at the winter solstice. I should have read this in December but when I came across it earlier this month I couldn’t help checking it out from the library. I wanted to know more about the roots of the older traditions surrounding the Winter Solstice before it was taken over by the Church. I didn’t really find that, but I did find several different takes from around the world on just what happens during the solstice, the shortest day of the year, and their explanations for why the sun goes away, and more importantly why it comes back after.

The Cambist and Lord Iron

by Daniel Abraham

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This short story was originally part of a collection of short stories titled Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, a collection of stories based on winning words at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It was also published in The Years Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. “The Cambist and Lord Iron”, of course, was based on the word cambist. A cambist is a person that exchanges money from one exchange rate to another (franks to pounds, yen to dollars). In this story the cambist is approached by a rich man (Lord Iron) who wants to make trouble and exchange some very rare and practically unknown type of bills for pounds sterling. By English law the cambist must legally exchange the money in 24 hours. In this both Lord Iron and the reader learn an interesting lesson about economics that begins about money and ends about far greater things than that.

Mirror, Mirror

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The genre of fairy tales has been tamed over the years to the point where they are just considered innocent stories for children and nothing more. Jane Yolen and her daughter Heidi Stemple bring back those fairy tales and look at the originals and variants from all over the world that show that these stories are many things, but they are not for small children. In Mirror, Mirror mother and daughter take a look at the fairy tales that shaped the past of motherhood and the relationships between mothers and daughters and discuss them in light of modern day motherhood and mother/daughter relationships. They discuss everything from abuse to abandonment, coming of age to marriage, rage and love, sex and death. A great book for mothers and daughters to read together to look at their relationships through the “mirror” of the past and to get women talking about each other, their relationship and themselves.

Just Ella

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Happily never after. Or so it seems at first. Just Ella is a rewritten take on the famous fairy tale Cinderella. Only in this story Ella takes herself to the ball, evading a wicked stepmother and sweeping Prince Charming off his feet without any outside help of the magical or furry little creature kind. Once she gets everything she has ever dreamed of, through hard work, cunning and ingenuity it is just to discover that she is just another naive princess after all. The fairy tale she’s worked so hard to achieve is not what it’s cracked up to be.