Review by New York Times Review
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO RETELL A STORY? Does it mean dressing up a familiar tale in different clothes? Reading it against its grain? Replacing parts of a story like boards in a ship, until an old story's shape is built of entirely new wood? This month, I'm looking at recent books that are all retellings of one sort or another. I've long found fairy-tale retellings to be empowering, subversive or both. But I've never encountered anything quite like THE MERRY SPINSTER: Tales of Everyday Horror (Holt, paper, $17). In it, Daniel Mallory Ortberg twists folk and fairy tales into elegant garrotes evocative of Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Kingdoms of Elfin" by way of Donald Barthelme and traditional murder ballads. Throughout "The Merry Spinster," gender is as slippery a proposition as happiness. No one called "merry" actually is so, any more than a daughter is necessarily referred to as "she." Girls are named Paul, boys are named Sylvia; love is oppressive, abusive, exploitative and equal-opportunity in its dreadfulness, whether between friends and lovers, parents and children, or children and stuffed animals. The incongruities invite attention, prompt us to question our assumptions about gender with every startling juxtaposition of name and pronoun, and our assumptions about relationships with every pairing where love is vampiric and destructive. Each story makes space for reflection more than it makes claims - and every page flutters with anxiety so thorough I sometimes had to stand up and walk around before resuming my reading. Perpendicular to its gender play are questions of consent, labor, the warp and weft of gift and debt, all the things we give to and take from one another, especially property and pain. In the title story - a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" - Beauty encounters the following inscription in the library that's ostensibly hers: "The library is yours. "The books are mine. "Your eyes are your own. "What you read is up to me." These stories are full of suffocating generosity, aggression so passive it's like breathing splinters. There's not a single weak link in the cat's-breath chain of this collection - only an initial shock at what sort of experience the book is. If you're familiar with Ortberg's work as a humorist, either from The Toast or "Texts From Jane Eyre," this is something else; even the stories adapted from the "Children's Stories Made Horrific" series on The Toast have sharper claws, are more primly vicious. It may ruin tea for you, or teach you something of how not to be a terrible person. Either way, it's incredible. Speaking of tea, Aliette de Bodard's the tea master and THE DETECTIVE (Subterranean, signed limited edition, $40) IS a delicate, gender-bent recasting of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in the far future of her Xuya universe, the gorgeously mannered space opera setting of celebrated novellas like "The Citadel of Weeping Pearls" and "On a Red Station, Drifting." In a galactic slum called the Scattered Pearls belt, a sentient ship called the Shadow's Child struggles to make rent after a traumatic event in the course of her military duty forces her into a circumscribed civilian life. Where once she ferried people through perilous, reality-bending portions of space, she now makes a living as a "brewer of serenity," synthesizing cocktails of mind-altering drugs that help humans endure the "deep spaces" she can no longer travel. But when a woman named Long Chau engages her services to study corpses in deep space, the Shadow's Child finds herself needing to confront portions of her past she'd rather forget. This isn't a tidy transposition of Holmes and Watson into far-future space, for all that the elements of homage (Long Chau is an abrasive self-medicating "consulting detective") shine through. The Shadow's Child is a fully realized character in her own right, and the dislike she feels for Long Chau is sustained and justified. Instead it's a window onto a beautifully developed world that widens the meaning of space opera, one that centers on Chinese and Vietnamese cultures and customs instead of Western military conventions, and is all the more welcome for it. Kelly Robson's GODS, MONSTERS, AND THE LUCKY PEACH (Tor.com, paper, $14.99) is a story that retells itself. It's a brilliantly structured far-future novella focused on ancient history: Its locales are primarily Calgary in 2267 and Mesopotamia in 2024 B.C. In one, humanity has ravaged the planet's surface, moved underground, and has only just begun to make the surface habitable again; in the other, King Shulgi and Susa, a priestess, argue about new stars in the sky and the meaning of portents. The story's poles are past and future, sky and earth; everything in between thrums with a delicious tension carefully developed among the wonderful characters. Minh is a senior consultant at ESSA, a firm that specializes in restoring and maintaining surface habitats. Minh herself specializes in restoring rivers and has spent decades wrangling underground banks into funding aboveground projects - until the invention of limited-use time travel turns bankers away from long-term ecological restoration and toward shortterm profits from temporal tourism. But when Minh's intern Kiki draws her attention to a call for proposals to restore the Mesopotamian drainage basin by traveling into the past to study it, she jumps at the chance. Robson's world-building is fantastic; I'm always grateful for books that fold business and finance systems into their narratives in lively ways. She writes about strategizing on RFPs and securing funding like planning a heist, with absolutely delightful team-assembling dynamics and fake-it-tillyou-make-it bravado. I also loved the dynamic between Minh and Kiki, loosely echoing some of the boomer-millennial rhetoric of our present moment in complex and empathetic ways. My only problem with this book is its length; it reads like the first three acts of a perfectly paced and plotted five-act novel, to the point where I wondered if the rest had been cleanly sheared off at the printer's. It's a short story's conclusion to a novel's worth of development, and while I certainly hope that Robson will write a sequel, I can't help feeling dismayed by an amazing story that stops instead of ending. A novel that certainly doesn't skimp on length, Tessa Gratton's THE QUEENS OF INNIS LEAR (Tor, $36.99) IS a high-fantasy transformation of Shakespeare's "King Lear" set in a world where magic and ecology are intimately connected. On the island of Innis Lear, there is the high magic of reading the stars, and the low magic of wormwork and rootwater; when everything's in balance, these systems intersect in complex and fruitful ways. But ever since the starprophesied loss of his wife, Dalat, King Lear has capped the island's holy wells and devoted himself exclusively to the stars, forbidding the language of trees and roots, and going slowly mad while the island's crops and climate fail around him. Reading "Queens" is at first a study in finding analogues. While Lear is Lear, his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia become Gaela, Regan and Elia; Edgar and Edmund are Rory and Ban. But the Shakespearean counterparts are at most touchstones for the fully developed characters Gratton writes. Most notably, Gaela and Regan aren't petty, scheming villains; they're grieving daughters who've had to wonder for years whether their father murdered their mother. Gratton's decision to make Dalat black, from the empress-ruled Third Kingdom "an ocean and half a continent away," thoroughly enriches the story. A young Gaela is infuriated by the lack of songs praising dark skin; Elia, when she goes abroad, is assumed to be from the Third Kingdom, even though she doesn't speak its language or know its customs. While the storytelling is certainly decompressed - the novel has a somewhat ponderous prologue, seven different points of view, and a flashback every other chapter - "Queens" is always thoroughly engaging; right up until the end, I found myself wondering with increasing urgency whether this story, like " Lear," would end in tragedy. I'll leave you to wonder, too. amal EL-MOHTAR won the Nebula, Locus and Hugo awards for her short story "Seasons of Glass and Iron." Her novella "This Is How You Lose the Time War," written with Max Gladstone, will be published in 2019.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 22, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Fairy tales often have dark undertones, but Lavery (Text from Jane Eyre, 2014) brings those tones right to the top in this collection of reimagined tales. Lavery infuses his stories with unsettling surrealism, sharp social commentary, a mordant sense of humor, and little in the way of true love. "Daughter Cells" features an insouciant mermaid fixated on possessing a human soul. In "The Rabbit," a plush bunny seems to draw the life force out of a little boy, all in the hope of speeding up the process of becoming "real." There's not much classic horror writing here; rather, Lavery cultivates a deep sense of unease, both in his compellingly odd, archaic language and the gulf between characters' words and actions, like in his take on The Wind in the Willows, when Rat and Mole drive Toad to despair with honeyed-but ultimately sinister-words of friendship. Lavery successfully pinpoints a kernel of real horror in each of the stories he recasts, and although his smart, weird writing might not be for everyone, it will bewitch macabre, literary-minded readers. --Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Unlike most modern versions of fairy tales, Lavery¿s sly, scathing renditions avoid clichés and self-referential edginess, and instead strike directly at the heart. Lavery (Notes from Jane Eyre) has been deconstructing and rewriting fairy tales and children¿s stories for some time, most notably on his former website The Toast; this collection of those pieces triumphantly transcends the possible pitfalls, brimming with satirical horror. In the sheer inhumanity of his Little Mermaid¿s outlook in the cheerfully corrosive ¿The Daughter Cells¿ and the Kenneth Grahame¿meets-Barthelme gaslighting of ¿Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Mr. Toad,¿ Lavery¿s voice echoes the standard pragmatic pedagogy of the oral-tradition fairy tale narrator in a charming, bitingly ironic way. ¿The Rabbit,¿ a brilliant take on The Velveteen Rabbit and one of the most deeply disturbing horror stories of the last several years, uses the emotional power of the original novel to get past the reader¿s defenses. Throughout, gender roles blur and dissolve to reemerge in unexpected shapes. The book brings the shock of the new and the shock of recognition into play at the same time; it¿s a tour de force of skill, daring, and hard-earned bravura. (Mar.)This review has been updated to reflect the author's gender transition. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This delightfully disturbing collection of folk tales, fairy tales, and Bible stories from Ortberg (Texts from Jane Eyre, 2014), an expansion of her series Children's Stories Made Horrific from the cult-favorite website The Toast, delivers on chills, laughs, and much more.A version of "The Little Mermaid" that is more concerned with cultural perceptions of property rights than singing crabs. A retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" in which the former title character is a dreadful bore and the latter is unbearably pedantic. A reimagining of The Velveteen Rabbit starring a far more ambitious stuffed animal than the depressing original version. There is plenty of humor to be had here, with Ortberg's signature biting wit and nerdy whimsy out in full force ("Daughters are as good a thing as any to populate a kingdom withif you've got them on hand. They don't cost much more than their own upkeep, which you're on the hook for regardless, so it's not a bad strategy to put them to use as quickly as possible"). Pointing out the darker aspects of children's stories and Disney movies has become as much a clich as the original princesses and fairy godmothers were, but Ortberg's point of view is thoughtful, insightful, and unpretentious. Gender is entirely fluid, as characters debate "which of us gets to be wife," there is a girl named Paul, a brother named Sylvia, and "daughters" who use "he/him" pronouns. One story that borrows from the Grimm stories "The Six Swans" and "The Twelve Brothers" comments on the different ways men and women are subjected to suffering. Riffs on Frog and Toad Are Friends, "Cinderella," King Lear, and "The Frog Prince" reflect on abusive relationship dynamics. If anything, Ortberg doesn't twist the stories so much as illuminate how layered and complicated they really are.A wholly satisfying blend of silliness, feminist critique, and deft prose makes this a collection of bedtime stories that will keep you up at night for all the right reasons. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
