How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
Jane Yolen
Tachyon Publications
SF & Fantasy, Teens & YA
How I feel about Jane Yolen’s How to Fracture a Fairy Tale has a lot to do with the book’s title.
It is what drew me to the book, as a reader and as a writer. I started at the beginning
and was reading through. The first couple of essays and stories caught my
attention, but my interest started to flag. Maybe because I’ve read so many
fairy tales and rewritten fairy tales, they lose their shininess after a few. A
writer really has to alter the fairy tale significantly or remove the traces of
the fairy tale in an updated telling. It isn’t enough to wave politics to reflect today’s mores (unless this is your first book of revised fairy
tales).
I skipped to the poetry to see how those fared and found
what I was looking for in the title. The commentary and poems show the writer’s
mind at work. The writer herself said the poems were written to go with the
stories, so I wondered why they were so separated from their story pairings.
Maybe some people don’t like commentary. Maybe some don’t like poems, but the
design should at least stand the poems beside the stories if not the commentary
as well. Let those who only like stories turn one page instead of
making everyone else—who is intrigued by the interplay between works, the way a
fairy tale can be reconstructed in different ways—flip to the end of the book
to read together what was intended to go together.
To me, the ordering affects how I’d rate the book. As it
stands, it’s fine with some interesting retellings. If it were ordered as it
seemed intended from the title and from the commentary, I’d recommend readers mob the book. At least, my mind became more engaged when I reordered.
The highlights of the collection include “Snow in Summer”
(a Snow White retelling with a down-home voice) and “The Bridge's Complaint” (a
bridge tells his version of the troll and the billy goats, mostly for the surprising
perspective), “Great-Grandfather Dragon's Tale” (this describes an unusual “man
raised by wild animals” tale—dragons, no less—interesting for its frame structure
and the emotion evoked by a simple symbol). In “Cinder Elephant” Cinderella is
overweight and can speak in the language of birds.
Even if the stories aren’t stunning, they contain intriguing
aspects such as “Happy Dens; or, A Day in the Old Wolves' Home” where wolves in
a nursing home get to tell their side of the story (a curious and ambiguous
ending). There’s a nice wish-fulfilment one where the prophet, Elijah, saves
Jews from concentration camps while another tells of a mother who’s died to
return as a vampire.
A few, like the thrilling novelette “One Ox, Two Ox, Three
Ox, and the Dragon King,” could have been improved by updating the fairy-tale-ness
a little further, perhaps modernizing the language a little more or erasing more
of the fairy-tale tracks.
The collection is definitely worth investigating. Maybe you
agree with the present ordering, or maybe you can try it as the book seems to
suggest it wants to be. Either way, turning the page isn’t too hard a chore to
get the book that you want. I, for one, want How to Fracture a Fairy Tale.
