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***Thanks to NetGalley and Nicholas Brealey Publishing for an eARC of this book. The following review is my honest reflection on the text provided.
Over the course of my trail, I tried to work out what makes a 'fairy tale'. An eventyr, 'adventure', a Märchen, a 'little tale', hikayah al-khayaliyeh, a 'story of the imagination'.
The reason these stories still speak to us is because they were set down by people who knew poverty and wealth, love and hate, fear and excitement, just as we do today; people who shared in the humus of human life.
One of the less palatable lessons of traditional fairy tales is that curiosity (especially in young women) is often answered with punishment rather than reward. But if you've got the itch, you're going to find it awfully hard to stop scratching.
Giambattista builds his stories around women fighting with all the resources at their disposal. For all their flaws, and for all the platitudes of conventional misogyny sprinkled throughout the book, they are rarely silent or inactive.
It was also nice to move to different, somewhat unexpected parts of the world to learn more about the men behind some famous fairy tales. Hanna Dyab, a Syrian writer, brings us Aladdin and Ali Baba, Ivan Khudiakov is considered a Russian revolutionary who popularised Baba Yaga, and Somadeva, a prolific poet from India whose book was:
twice as long as the Odyssey and the Iliad combined - roughly the length of The Lord of the Rings.
Sure, there are princes and princesses, but only occasionally: Hanna shows that anybody can drive a story. The way is led by rope makers and robbers, slaves and street kids, tea sellers and tree fellers.
Stories flowed along the routes of caravans and ships, burrowing into their new host societies, adapting to local conditions, reshaped by new storytellers who added their own spin on them and made them their own.
murdered by a volcano
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