Two books came in on hold for me the same day. One, more or less a traditional fairy tale redone as a novel. The other, women’s fiction featuring a depressed recent divorcee who lost custody of her children. Guess which one turned out to be dark? Not the one I’ve picked initially, for sure.
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente One of my favorite books growing up was a collection of Russian fairy tales – translated from the French, it turns out, with beautiful illustrations by Zvorykin (here, Koschei the Deathless carrying off Maria Morevna, the beautiful Tsarevna). And any regular Library Mama reader will know how I love a good fairy tale turned novel. Well. “Koschei the Deathless”, more or less, set in early twentieth-century Russia, and told from the point of view of Marya Morevna, rather than the more usual Ivan. (For those not familiar with Russian fairy tales, Ivan usually plays the role of a Jack.) It’s a darkly beautiful tale, filled with sex, blood, suffering, and, oddly, birds. 
While Koschei the Deathless is usually a flat-out villain, everything in this book is painted in murky in-between shades. Koschei is still cruel, yes, still a seducer of beautiful young women. But he is also the embodiment of Life, engaged in the eternal struggle against his brother, Death. We will say that the beginning of the last century in Russia was a particularly rough time for Life. And there is metafiction, too, as Marya Morevna knows the old stories of Koschei. Evan as she loves him and struggles to complete the tasks set to be able to marry him, she knows that in her story, one day an Ivan will come to tempt her away from Koschei. It’s more about the difficulty of the choices that we make than the simple morality of the classic tales, and that makes it a fairy tale for those able to deal with the ambiguity of life.
Originally posted at http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .
Magical Tales from Many Lands Retold by Margaret Mayo. Illustrated by Jane Ray I’m always on the lookout for good stories to read curled up with my son. Key features would include stories that work well read aloud, hopefully short enough to read at bedtime or before little sister becomes indistractable, and good pictures. I’ve loved Jane Ray’s work in Berlie Doherty’s Fairy Tales for years, but only recently found this earlier work. I still love Jane Ray’s style, folk-art like with lots of gold highlights. In this book, she blends her disctinctive style with elements of the art of the culture she’s representing to create work that’s both cohesive throughout the book and reflective of the culture each story is from. The stories are Arabic (“The Lemon Princess”), Japanese, Chinese, Russian (a slightly less frightening “Baba Yaga Bony-Legs” than I’m used to), African (a version of “Unanana and the Elephant,” a story I remember from one of my favorite childhood storybooks of feminist folk tales.), African-American, Native American, French and more. It’s a good mix of cultures, and while the collection doesn’t feature all women, there are enough stories of strong women that the collection never feels bogged down with outdated attitudes about women. They are well told, with lots of the repetitive language that works so well for story-telling. Although perhaps less interesting to children, I really appreciated her notes on each tale, explaining the source or sources and her deviations from that version. It’s from 1993, so currently out of print, but still available used for reasonable prices and of course free from libraries.
Cold Magic by Kate Elliot Catherine, known as Cat, is a young woman of impoverished good blood attending University with her cousin Bee, with whom she has lived since her parents’ death when she was seven. It’s the Industrial Revolution (one could call it steampunk if one wished, though there is not so very much steam power in it); today’s lecture is on the science of air ships, one of which will be available for viewing that evening. That was the plan, anyway, until a cold mage arrives at their house with a claim on her, the oldest Hassi Barahal daughter. From there, things heat up, despite the cold surrounding cold mages. Cat is forced to leave her family and make several discoveries: family secrets that leave her wondering if she can trust anyone, the unpleasant plans the cold mages have for her, and previously unknown relations. It’s an alternate earth with a lovely deep culture. The cold mages are a union of Celtic and Mande African formed a few centuries back when the Mande nobility were forced to leave Africa because of a plague of ghouls, while Cat is of Phonecian heritage. Now the cold mages are the upholders of the current powers, opposed to science and industry and opposed by a growing populist movement. Cat is a delightful character, prickly enough not to set off goody-two-shoes alarms, yet not so headstrong as to make the reader want to bash heads against the wall in frustration. And the plot took enough twisty turns that I was frequently surprised at what happened next. As is typical for the genre, this is the first in a series, so you can choose to wait to read the book until the rest are out or be impatient with me. 
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Read by Cassandra Campbell with Bahni Turpin.
The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich In this book, Erdrich, author of several authors focusing on Native Americans and prairie life, writes about the first year of her daughter’s life. Although she says the baby in the book is a composite of all three of her daughters, in the book it sounds like she is writing about the youngest of her three daughters. It’s poetic and reflective, honest about the difficulty of parenting a baby while at the same time stunningly beautiful. It doesn’t hurt that Erdrich lives in a cabin in the woods, and the baby’s stages are mixed in with large doses of the natural life outside their window and the woods through which they walk. She writes, as an example of the tough times, of how hard it is to keep a sense of self apart from the baby, how easy suicide seems after weeks of sleepless nights – only her self is so absorbed in the baby that she feels that she has no self of her own left to kill. On the plus side, she writes about breastfeeding, how many great romantic writers’ deep inarticulate longings were really for that feeling of unity and transcendence that breastfeeding brings. Despite the poetry and deep thoughts, the book is slim enough to get through easily, an important consideration for sleep-deprived new parents. The saddest part for me was knowing that the happy blended family described in this book fell apart just a few years later, giving the already fleeting pleasures of a baby and the changing of the seasons an even more ephemeral feeling. 
Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein Why are girls only allowed to wear or use pink anymore? And why are girls of preschool age suddenly obsessed with Disney Princesses, in all their sparkly but bland glory? Journalist Orenstein sets out to investigate these questions in this fast-reading book which nevertheless has some good scholarly underpinnings. Many of the ideas are not new – the fine line, for example, between telling girls that they are pretty and that they need to be pretty. But Orenstein’s exploration gets everything nicely together in one place, and her personal explorations are entertaining. She talks to Disney executives and visits the American Girl store in Manhattan, noting the dichotomy between the affordable glitz of the Disney and the hugely expensive old-fashioned simplicity of American Girls. She visits the Toy Fair and talks with toy marketers who make everything in pink, and say they are just “honoring play patterns”. She visits child beauty pageants and talks to parents there. She reads unsanitized fairy tales to her daughter and watches for nightmares. The chapter “From Wholesome to Whoresome” examines the sad fate of former tween stars, following which she looks at the on-line culture and teens’ place in it. Parents of girls of all ages will pay almost anything for the illusions of innocence and protection that are marketed in varying aspects to girls of all ages. Although many of the major arguments were familiar, I did learn some new and interesting if troubling facts: Kindergarten girls when asked to write a sentence in which they pretend to be something limit themselves to one of four choice: princess, fairy, ballerina or butterfly, where boys’ choices are much more varied. Toy choices, we know, seem quite hard-wired to gender, even across species, but there is nothing else but mate selection that is as tied to gender. I was really disturbed to read that recent studies asking teens and college girls about their own sexual feelings have gotten answered with how the girls think they look, with no consciousness of their own possibility for arousal. And while I knew that “tweens” as an age group was a recent invention of marketers to create a new market, I hadn’t realized that toddlerhood started the same way a century ago. There are more problems and pitfalls pointed out here than hard-and-fast solutions. I still hope for balance for my daughter and for other girls, for the confidence to be themselves, embracing aspects both traditionally feminine and masculine, and yet still to fit in well enough not be as isolated as I felt especially during my teen years. This is well worth reading for parents and anyone else interested in modern girls. 
Natural Hospital Birth by Cynthia Gabriel Even though I feel quite done with having children, I am fascinated with birth, and I definitely want to be able to recommend good recent books to friends who are having babies. I had pretty low expectations of this book when I picked it up off the waiting-to-be-cataloged cart. The introduction hooked me enough that I checked it out and took it home as soon as it was ready. Gabriel starts off by talking about why people who want to give birth naturally might choose a hospital, even though American hospitals are quite inexperienced with natural births right now. The part that hooked me is that what she tells women is that she aims for a natural birth because she loves it. But, she has excellent creds for writing the book. She’s an anthropologist who worked in Russian hospitals where epidurals are rare, and a doula who attends births in Ann Arbor and therefore, unlike an OB, sees lots of births from start to finish. She advocates using doulas or home-birth midwives to help find the most natural-birth-friendly hospital practice you can, then building support rather than fighting by doing things like bringing in a natural birth story and talking about your hopes for a natural birth each visit. She strongly recommends that unless you are a health care professional yourself, you argue the emotional benefits of a natural birth over the health risks of a medically assisted one. She goes into some depth over writing a birth plan, recommending three separate ones: one for just you, describing your not-reality-tethered dream birth; one for your birth team (husband, doula, whatever friends you invite to help with your birth) detailing what they can do to help with that, such as turning off lights when staff members leave and answering questions on your behalf; and one short, sweet and positive one for the medical staff. Be sure, too, she says, to take a birth class out of the hospital, to help prepare for the tough realities of labor rather than just be educated on the hospital routines. She has sections detailing lots of individual snags you might run into, and longer sections for the tough cases of abuse survivors, multiples, and VBACs. The book is filled with positive birth stories and lots of encouragement. This is a very solid book, highly practical for anyone planning a hospital birth.
Sewn With Love by Fiona Bell I’ve had a really hard time finding time for sewing since I had children, and I’ve mostly only made the time to sew garb, since that’s really hard and expensive to buy if you don’t make it yourself. And yet – when I saw this book at work, not even cataloged yet, I was inspired. It is full of beautiful, classic designs for clothes and accessories, for both boys and girls. OK, the clothing for boys was in the simple department – button-down shirts, shorts, and pajamas. The bulletin board was done in a more masculine print, too, and the simple but adorable stuffed frog (indeed, all the non-clothing items) could easily go either way. The girls’ clothing featured lots of dresses with full skirts and details like pin tucks, lace, or rick-rack. Pretty much everything is done in vintage-looking print fabric. I was so inspired that I checked out the book and am trying to make a dress for my little girl. And now comes the reality check. The book has lots of gorgeous color photography of all the clothes, and instructions for sewing. A CD-ROM in the back includes patterns to print out. Not until I went to print out the pattern was I able to track down the size chart. Instead of putting the ranges for the patterns with each pattern, this is located in a tiny box buried at the back of the book. Even though most patterns in the book give the yardage required, they give just one yardage for all the size ranges, which is quite puzzling. I discovered as I was going to print out the pattern that my daughter is too big for the largest size of the baby patterns I’d chosen, though still too young for me to feel she’d look good in any of the big girl patterns. I do wish they’d put the size ranges with differentiated yardage requirements in for each pattern, and, again puzzling, their measurements assume that children have waists smaller than their chests. The photographs are gorgeous, but not calculated to show the full design of the garments, and no schematic drawings are given either in the book or on the cd-rom. The instructions are written for people with a fair amount of sewing experience – she suggests starting with the laundry bag or the duvet cover if you’re new to sewing. I have yet to find explanations for the symbols used in the patterns – again fine if you’re experienced. Bell also seems to assume that the sewer will have both a regular sewing machine and a serger. On the plus side, she does include resources for buying vintage-style fabric (she uses 
The Adventures of Thor the Thunder God by Lisa Lunge-Larsen. Illustrated by Jim Madsen So there’s a movie about Thor coming out, and somehow the boy, despite it being far too old for him, has picked up on this and is wildly interested in Thor. A movie based loosely (I presume) on comic books, which are based loosely on old Norse legends. Naturally I looked for something as close to the original as possible, and found this rare collection of stories all about Thor. We have stories of how Thor got his hammer, of a visit to mortals, and of course, how his hammer, Mjolnir, was lost and recovered. The large, full-page illustrations look something in between your classic fairy-tale oil and animation, which works well. This is a great book for young would-be Thor admirers. 
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. Performed by Stephen Briggs. I view Terry Pratchett as a fantasy savings account. Not as in money, but as in “If I am ever in the bind for some light but good fantasy entertainment, there will always be a Terry Pratchett I haven’t yet read.” The books are enough part of the world to feel familiar, but free-standing enough that I don’t feel out of the loop for going years between Discworld visits. I had one of these moments recently, and was so happy to find an audio copy of this recent effort. In this book, the wizards of Unseen University discover to their horror that they will lose a good bit of funding if they don’t start playing the game of Foot the Ball. This is a raucous street game, with very loose rules and intensely loyal local teams throughout Ankh-Morphokh. Below stairs, we meet another cast of characters who get caught up in the ensuing madness: Nutt, a very well-educated goblin who is inexplicably working as a candle dribbler; Trev, the head candle dribbler, previously specializing in nothing much but being able to kick a tin can around wherever he goes; Glenda, the large and capable head of the night kitchen; and Juliet, her assistant, whose fairly empty but beautiful head attracts notice from every male who sees her. There’s some romance, a bit of dwarf fashion, a little reflection on racism, and a whole lot of silly fun, admirably read by the capable Briggs.
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