Second paragraph of third story (“Grimm Reality”, by Ana Salome):
I live in a ninth floor flat at the Elephant and Castle. It was the coldest winter day for a decade and my boiler was broken. I had never seen my windows iced over before. Although I was cold to the bone I thought how pretty they were. Like a child I made pictures from the ice patterns. There was a long sharp nose and jagged ears; it could have been Jack Frost. And there was a tiny figure – I took a breath; it looked like a fairy, incredibly tiny and frozen to the window pane. How beautiful, how detailed and how impossibly real. As I looked more closely a wave of something like shock or panic passed through me. This wasn’t an interpretation, a Rorschach blot or Christ in a split aubergine, it was something real.
Another of the books sponsored by the La Leche League, this is an anthology of eighteen retellings of fairy stories – some of them traditional tales reworked from the female perspective, or updated to a modern context, or both; and some of them completely new stories. It was published in 2016 and I picked it up at Eastercon in 2022. None of the authors are well known – the most prominent is the editor herself, Teika Bellamy, who as Maria Smits has a couple of dozen published short stories to her credit, but ISFDB has not heard of most of the contributors.
None the less, this is all good stuff, and it was an interesting almost-paired reading with Alan Garner from a couple of weeks back. There’s a big difference to having one man process legends from all over the world, and a group of mostly women (there is one male controbutor) adapting mostly classic European tales, but at the same time there is a primal quality about all of the stories that comes through.
It begins and ends with two excellent and different takes on the same legend, “Rumplestiltskin” by Rebecca Ann Smith and “Trash into Cash” by Becky Tipper. Of the others, I will especially remember the adaptation of Snow White, “Mirror, Mirror” by Laura Kayne, which blames the mirror more than any of the human characters. But these are all good, especially considering that the writers are mostly at the very start of their writing careers.
The book is also blessed with lovely illustrations by Emma Howitt – little roundels for each story. Here is the first.
All in all, an impressive collection; I am not even sure if I paid for it. You can get The Forgotten and the Fantastical 2 here.
This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is De gekste plek van België, by Jeroen van der Spek.
