The Silver Curlew

The Silver Curlew / Eleanor Farjeon
Victoria, BC: Rare Treasure Editions, 2021, c1953.
176 p.

Another children's book this week - this one a real delight as well. I have always enjoyed Eleanor Farjeon, so was pleased to find one I hadn't yet read in my library catalogue. The Silver Curlew is a retelling of Rumpelstiltsken but with all the added charm of a Farjeon story. 

We find the Codlings, Mother and children, living in a windmill in Norfolk. Doll, who is 18, is beautiful and indolent. What she loves most is daydreaming and eating. Poll, much younger, is a lively outdoorsy kind of girl with enough get up and go for both of them. The older boys are working and not integral to the story. 

One day the spoiled king of Norfolk happens by just at the time that he's looking for a wife. Beautiful Doll catches his eye, especially when the family brags about her (non-existent) spinning prowess to cover up a more embarrassing family incident. He marries her, with the exception known to all fairy tale readers - she must spin enough thread to use up all the bundles he stuffs the house with, or off with her head. 

And a spindle imp appears to help her. Then one year later he reappears when Doll has to spin again - or he'll take her and her newborn baby too. Poll must find all her courage to save her family from ruin. 

Being Farjeon, the story is full of extras -- wry humour, caricatures such as the spoiled king, lots of rhymes and songs interspersed in the story, an extra fairy tale of the man and woman in the moon embedded in this story, and a quite scary encounter for Poll with the imp and his minions in the midst of the dark wood. 

There is real magic in this story; it has its own atmosphere and the wordplay is part of it. It's like a dream, where it doesn't matter if things make sense, you just have to deal with them as they appear. It's short enough to be read all in one go, which I would recommend as you don't want to break the spell this story weaves. I loved it. 

The Skull

The Skull / Jon Klassen
Somerville, MA: Candlewick, c2023.
106 p.

This little middle grade read was recommended to me by a friend, and so I read it -- quickly, as it's barely 100 pages, with lots of illustration and minimal text. But it is quite odd and adorable, and I would pass on the recommendation to experience this story! 

It's a rewrite of a Tyrolean folk tale that Canadian writer Jon Klassen read in a collection once and when he went back to reread it, realized he had remembered it quite differently than the original. So he wrote a new version reflecting his own experience of the story.

This author has published quite a few picture books and his style is distinct. In this chapter book, he has more range for more illustrations, but it is all very recognizably his own. The story begins with young Otilla, who runs away from home through a dark forest, and comes upon a big old house in a clearing. It's inhabited by a skull. Otilla befriends the skull, and discovers that it is afraid of something that enters the house each night. But Otilla is fearless, and saves the day. And she finds her own kind of happy ending, with safety and friendship in her own manner. 

It's dark, and quiet, and sparely told, but very effective. Otilla's determination and quick thinking saves her multiple times in the story, and her character may encourage readers going through hard times. It has a folkloric charm that is really memorable. 

You can watch a talk with Jon Klassen about this book via the Winnipeg International Writers' Festival here: 

The Charmed Wife

The Charmed Wife / Olga Grushin
NY: Putnam, 2021.
288 p.

I grabbed this one when it came into my library, as I'm a fan of Olga Grushin's writing, and I do like a good fairy tale retelling. However, I wasn't thoroughly convinced by this book. 

The cover is a good indication of the story; our main character, Cinderella, is stuck in her marriage after 13 and a half years and two children. She tries to find a way out but always comes back to where she started. As the book opens, she's sneaking out to the crossroads at midnight to find a crone who will curse her husband and free her of him. But does she really want to? 

That's the question that haunts this book. What does Cinderella actually want? How is she herself culpable in this miserable, joyless life she's leading, one that is supposed to be the apex of a charmed life? There are some serious, heavy questions at the heart of this book.

There is much to entertain the reader here - elements of other fairytales and characters to recognize, truth to sort out among various interpretations by different characters, and so on. But I felt it leaned too heavily on other retellings, in particular, the Disney movie interpretations. There are a pair of mice who accompany Cinderella to the palace, which is full of teapot servants and the like. And the mouse subplot seems strange, until one reaches the end and sees how important mice are to the life of human beings and worlds. 

But the main failing of my reading experience was the conclusion, which felt perilously close to the "it was all a dream" pitfall. Although it does make sense in a way, it wasn't quite satisfying enough for me. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood when I picked this one up, but it felt a little fey to me.