Ok, so Russian fairy tales. My favorites, obviously. And not merely because I grew up with them or because I have to love them due to my Russian heritage. No, they’re some of the best fairy tales in the world because they’re so exciting, confusing, and sometimes just plain crazy. But most importantly, they are just about as inclusive as anything you will ever read. They bring you in, huddle you up in a blanket, dump hygge on you in bucketfuls, and make you tremble both with fear and delight.
So when I heard about Jane Yolen’s short book, I was delighted. Baba Yaga, who shows up in my own novels in a slightly changed form, is a real favorite. And this novella was in verse! How cool is that? And how often does that happen nowadays? Plus, the verse really isn’t horrible, which to this lover of Gerard Manley Hopkins and T. S. Eliot is saying a lot.
The first half of this book I loved. The setting is perfect, if a bit annoyingly cliched. By that I mean that the wicked stepmother of our days has turned into the Calvinistically religious father… But I digress.
The use of fairy tale tropes, both in their hilariously modern remakes and in their surprisingly literal appearances (the doll, the comb, and the ribbon of the Baba Yaga tales all make literal appearances) were great. But the strange repressed sexual tension between the main character, Vasilisa, and Ivan the Prince was not. I didn’t like it. It was weird.
And that’s part of what ultimately made this a slight failure for me. I loved the form of it. I loved the idea of it. But fairy tales are supposed to include everyone. They’re universal in their simple (or not-so-simple) morality. This, however, is a feminist fable of a particularly specific type. You know how we are all often told that feminism isn’t just for women, that men can and should be good feminists too? This is not that kind of feminism. By the end of the book, I felt like the author was telling a morality tale that was directed at women only.
Not that there was any misandry in it or anything. No. Just exclusion. My disappointment stems from the fact that the author chose fairy tales, which are the most universal of all literary genres, to tell a tale meant for a very limited audience.
That being said, I’d read another of these novels-in-verse by Jane Yolen any day.
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