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Reviews tagging 'Emotional abuse'
Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold by Imogen Hermes Gowar, Naomi Booth, Emma Glass, Irenosen Okojie, Daisy Johnson, Natasha Carthew, Eimear McBride, Liv Little, Mahsuda Snaith, Kirsty Logan
3 reviews
nicnevin's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
A wonderful collection of reimagined folk tales I had never heard of before.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Ableism, Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Body horror, Body shaming, Bullying, Cancer, Child abuse, Child death, Classism, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gore, Grief, Infidelity, Medical content, Mental illness, Misogyny, Murder, Physical abuse, Pregnancy, Sexism, Sexual content, Terminal illness, Toxic friendship, Toxic relationship, Lesbophobia, and Homophobia
annick's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
A book of short stories written by contemporary female writers, based on a selection of English-language folktales.
I only recommend reading :
The Holloway
The Tale of Kathleen
The Panther’s Tale
I found the rest were tedious and uninteresting.
I only recommend reading :
The Holloway
The Tale of Kathleen
The Panther’s Tale
I found the rest were tedious and uninteresting.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Grief, Miscarriage, and Murder
krilves's review against another edition
challenging
dark
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
I received an ARC from netgalley in exchange for a fair review.
What drew me to this was the fact this was a collection of fairytale/folkmyth retellings of stories I'd never heard of before - I'm not British (I have only lived in the UK for a year) and my frame of reference is very different and very Scandinavian (particularly Icelandic). I don't know if this is a big part of the reason why I enjoyed the stories so much - not knowing the originals made everything fresh for me.
A Retelling - Daisy Johnson
To borrow from the preface, this is a meta tale of sorts, where the author writes herself into the story and discusses the retelling, even as she gets affected by the myth and drawn into it. I thought it had a horror-ish vibe (well, to be frank, don't most folk myths and stories have a degree of horror at their core?) and I liked the way the telling was framed, with the ending told first and then repeated again at the ending, making the whole thing rather reminiscent of greek tragedies. Based on the Green Children of Woolpit, Suffolk.
Sour Hall - Naomi Booth
This one might actually be my favourite of all of the stories. It's based on a Yorkshire myth about a boggart, but in this form the boggart has taken on a metaphorical embodiment of trauma. Like the previous story, it has a strong horror-vibe in my opinion, but this one isn't a tragedy - it's about healing and learning to exist with trauma. Also I appreciate the lesbian God's Own Country vibe on top of everything else. I really enjoyed this one. Based on Ay, We're Flittin', Yorkshire.
Rosheen - Irenosen Okijie
Another very horror-y story, but not because of supernatural reasons - because sometimes humans are all the horror you need. Rosheen goes in search of her father in Norfolk, gets work on a farm, and there it transpires that the farmer not only exploits workers, but murders them and keeps their heads in a barn. When the farmer tries to murder her by shoving her into an old well (full of other bodies) she realises that her father must've met the same fate and she crawls out of the well, murders the farmer, and adds his head to the collection in the barn. It's not my favourite story, but I liked the idea of it, and after reading the original tale thought this was a lovely take on it.
Based on the Dauntless Girl, Norfolk.
Between Sea and Sky - Kirsty Logan
I've read this author before so I had an idea of what to expect, and I got pretty much exactly what I expected. Like A Retelling, this one also starts with the ending and has the ending repeated at the end, again giving us a tragedy. It's a modern selkie story, about a mother who gives birth to a selkie boy - she's returned to her home island for a solo archeological dig, where she spends years slowly uncovering layers of skeleton, all mothers with little unborn selkie children in their bellies. In the end she meets the same fate (death) at the hands of her own selkie child, when he takes her to live with him under the sea. I liked that the mother and selkie boy had names of Scottish islands (Skye and Muir), and I liked the way this story was written, but ultimately it didn't blow me away. Fans of Kirsty Logan will likely enjoy it as it was very par for the course for her.
Based on The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie, Orkney
The Panther's Tale - Mahsuda Snaith
This one read very like a fairytale - a woman with a sick child gets help to heal her child from a princess in the form of a panther, and eventually decides to leave her husband for her - but also like a parable of colonialism and imperialism embodied, as the panther is an Indian princess, and she, along with 'exotic' animals has been forcibly removed from her country, and in the end, is unnecessarily killed because her captors do not understand her context...for there then to be raised an unremarkable monument for her that doesn't tell her full story and actively buries parts of it while elevating the deeds of her captors. I liked this story, and I wanted it to end differently - I wanted the growing love between the princess and the mother to come to fruit and I wanted a happy ending for both of them. In the end, we don't know what came of the mother and child, and the princess didn't get the respect she deserved. It's undeniably a powerful story.
Based on Chillington House, Stafford
The Tale of Kathleen - Eimear McBride
This was possibly my least favourite of the stories, if only because of how little it deviated from the original story (which I read afterwards). Even before I read the original story I was left somewhat unsatisfied - searching for a point, for the aha! the reason why this story was retold in this way, and I came up empty. The story itself is unchanged, it's only the way of the telling that is different. I've heard many good things about Eimear McBride and I have a copy of a A Girl is a Half-formed Thing I keep meaning to read, and yeah - she's knows how to string words and sentences together well and I really did enjoy the way this story was told. But ultimately the story was just kind of boring: another, somewhat typical, tragedy of the fae folk-contact type.
Based on the story of the same name, County Galway
The Sisters - Liv Little
This one is possibly my third favourite story. It's about two sisters (twins) who are both lesbians, only one came out as a teenager and was kicked out and the other repressed herself and took time to find her own identity. They're now in their mid twenties and their mother is dying, so the story revolves around the one sister reconnecting with her mother in the hospice, while the other sister is spending time with her sister's girlfriend, the two eventually starting something of a relationship. it's a story of dysfunctional relationships, of desiring and wanting to be desired. I thought the ending was a little abrupt and vaguely unfulfilled, but on the other hand I can't really imagine how else it would've ended - and it's a tragedy too, of sorts, as the mother died while the girlfriend and the sister were having sex in a car and so they missed the calls. I read the original story afterwards and found it was about two brothers who killed each other in a duel over a 'useless woman', the ground where the brothers touched being now cursed with nothing willing to grow on it. with that in mind, I went over this retelling again, and while I know that the retelling doesn't have to follow the original plot, I can't help but think the story could've been more compelling if a bit longer, if it had dwelled a bit more on the sisters' relationship. I did like that the girlfriend wasn't reduced to a 'useless woman' but was a person with needs and desires and flaws and everything, but I'd just have liked...to see it all a bit more fleshed out. I think it would've made for a punchier ending, too.
Based on Tavistock Square, London
The Dampness Is Spreading - Emma Glass
Ohh ok this one I actually knew the original folk myth beforehand, BUT not the Welsh version - the Icelandic one (there are several versions of this in Iceland as well, and I've read dozens of them). The two versions are almost identical save for a few minor details. I mention this because when I read this retelling I was unsettled by how it wasn't playing out the way I expected to - I was recognising the trope, for the lack of a better word, and it was being flipped in a way that didn't make sense to me. ANYWAY, this story - a bitter old midwife who has suffered several miscarriages and her husband leaving her because of it, is approached by a man she recognises from a previous midwifery job (when he was a child), whose sister is in labour. she helps the sister, and as the sister gives birth she is transformed into a monster, screaming about how the midwife must place the placenta over her baby's eyes so that the baby might recognise her mother. the midwife does so, the baby stops breathing, she revives the child, accidentally rubs one of her own eyes and gets placenta on it, and with that eye she can see the woman as beautiful as she was before she started transforming. the woman realises this and stabs the eye and the midwife wakes up in hospital later, blind in the eye, nobody in the hospital knows what happened and didn't see the transformation take place.
That's where the story stopped making sense to me, because in the original myths, both the Welsh and the Icelandic ones, it is a salve/ointment, and not a monstrous placenta, and the woman doesn't transform. What the ointment does for the midwife is it grants her sight of the elves (in Icelandic: sight of the hidden things/people) so with that eye she can see the elves as they walk among humans and she can see their houses and palaces and all the hidden things. In several Icelandic versions she loses the sight in that eye when an elf realises the midwife can see her, and either spits in that eye or touches it, or in some other way removes the effects of the salve - and in the Icelandic versions the midwife usually *intentionally* rubs that salve on one of her eyes, so being later punished by losing sight in that eye entirely is very par for the course, as the elves had not originally granted her that favour (though they had of course paid her handsomely for her assistance for the original job). In the Welsh myth this anointment is accidental, and the midwife is rather cruelly punished for it, and in this retelling the elves are made monstrous and even more cruel, and I'm still puzzled about the reversal of sight - her normal eye seeing the monster and the anointed eye seeing the beauty - it makes very little sense to me and it's driving me mad because that's not how the story goes, why, what is the point, what is going on - so I'm just going to shut up.
SO ANYWAY the story was compelling until this weird thing at the end, though also depressing as hell and more like a horror-tragedy than any of the other stories.
Based on The Fairy Midwife, Wales
The Droll of the Mermaid - Natasha Carthew
This is my second favourite story in this anthology - I love a good mermaid story, and this one feels familiar in a way that is hard to describe. I especially like this retelling, which elevated the original myth and centered kindness even more. This one isn't a tragedy or a horror story, this story has a happy ending, this story rewards kindness - unlike the midwife story that preceded this one, where the midwife's kindness in helping the birth is cruelly punished because of one small accident. I'm sorry for going on about it but it just makes me so mad. This story however is just lovely. It would've been a perfect ending to the anthology too imo, so I'm not sure why it wasn't placed at the end, but oh well.
Based on The Mermaid and the Man of Cury, Cornwall
The Holloway - Imogen Hermes Gowar
This is perhaps the most modern of all the stories in the anthology, depicting a family with an abusive father, an older brother who tries to protect his mother and little sister from him - he just got into university and doesn't want to go - and the little sister who asks the fairies to help her. her brother is who told her about the fairies, and so she leaves them little offerings and slips of paper asking for help, and eventually, one morning, the father is found dead on the moor. It being a very modern tale there's some uncertainty about whether the older brother had anything to do with it or whether the fairies did it, but the three remaining family members are, like victims of abuse, genuinely grieving but also relieved - all the complex emotions you'd expect. I like the story, and I think it would've been better placed somewhere else in the anthology rather than at the end.
Based on Old Farmer Mole, Somerset
All the original myths these retelling are based on are printed at the end of the book, which I found very helpful and also interesting.
Overall I really liked this anthology. There were some stories I didn't like as much, some that were good, and some that I really liked. I also really liked the illustrations for each story. They look like they're inspired by Pictish carvings, and I like how they illustrate a key element in the story in a way that doesn't always become apparent until the end.
What drew me to this was the fact this was a collection of fairytale/folkmyth retellings of stories I'd never heard of before - I'm not British (I have only lived in the UK for a year) and my frame of reference is very different and very Scandinavian (particularly Icelandic). I don't know if this is a big part of the reason why I enjoyed the stories so much - not knowing the originals made everything fresh for me.
A Retelling - Daisy Johnson
To borrow from the preface, this is a meta tale of sorts, where the author writes herself into the story and discusses the retelling, even as she gets affected by the myth and drawn into it. I thought it had a horror-ish vibe (well, to be frank, don't most folk myths and stories have a degree of horror at their core?) and I liked the way the telling was framed, with the ending told first and then repeated again at the ending, making the whole thing rather reminiscent of greek tragedies. Based on the Green Children of Woolpit, Suffolk.
Sour Hall - Naomi Booth
This one might actually be my favourite of all of the stories. It's based on a Yorkshire myth about a boggart, but in this form the boggart has taken on a metaphorical embodiment of trauma. Like the previous story, it has a strong horror-vibe in my opinion, but this one isn't a tragedy - it's about healing and learning to exist with trauma. Also I appreciate the lesbian God's Own Country vibe on top of everything else. I really enjoyed this one. Based on Ay, We're Flittin', Yorkshire.
Rosheen - Irenosen Okijie
Another very horror-y story, but not because of supernatural reasons - because sometimes humans are all the horror you need. Rosheen goes in search of her father in Norfolk, gets work on a farm, and there it transpires that the farmer not only exploits workers, but murders them and keeps their heads in a barn. When the farmer tries to murder her by shoving her into an old well (full of other bodies) she realises that her father must've met the same fate and she crawls out of the well, murders the farmer, and adds his head to the collection in the barn. It's not my favourite story, but I liked the idea of it, and after reading the original tale thought this was a lovely take on it.
Based on the Dauntless Girl, Norfolk.
Between Sea and Sky - Kirsty Logan
I've read this author before so I had an idea of what to expect, and I got pretty much exactly what I expected. Like A Retelling, this one also starts with the ending and has the ending repeated at the end, again giving us a tragedy. It's a modern selkie story, about a mother who gives birth to a selkie boy - she's returned to her home island for a solo archeological dig, where she spends years slowly uncovering layers of skeleton, all mothers with little unborn selkie children in their bellies. In the end she meets the same fate (death) at the hands of her own selkie child, when he takes her to live with him under the sea. I liked that the mother and selkie boy had names of Scottish islands (Skye and Muir), and I liked the way this story was written, but ultimately it didn't blow me away. Fans of Kirsty Logan will likely enjoy it as it was very par for the course for her.
Based on The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie, Orkney
The Panther's Tale - Mahsuda Snaith
This one read very like a fairytale - a woman with a sick child gets help to heal her child from a princess in the form of a panther, and eventually decides to leave her husband for her - but also like a parable of colonialism and imperialism embodied, as the panther is an Indian princess, and she, along with 'exotic' animals has been forcibly removed from her country, and in the end, is unnecessarily killed because her captors do not understand her context...for there then to be raised an unremarkable monument for her that doesn't tell her full story and actively buries parts of it while elevating the deeds of her captors. I liked this story, and I wanted it to end differently - I wanted the growing love between the princess and the mother to come to fruit and I wanted a happy ending for both of them. In the end, we don't know what came of the mother and child, and the princess didn't get the respect she deserved. It's undeniably a powerful story.
Based on Chillington House, Stafford
The Tale of Kathleen - Eimear McBride
This was possibly my least favourite of the stories, if only because of how little it deviated from the original story (which I read afterwards). Even before I read the original story I was left somewhat unsatisfied - searching for a point, for the aha! the reason why this story was retold in this way, and I came up empty. The story itself is unchanged, it's only the way of the telling that is different. I've heard many good things about Eimear McBride and I have a copy of a A Girl is a Half-formed Thing I keep meaning to read, and yeah - she's knows how to string words and sentences together well and I really did enjoy the way this story was told. But ultimately the story was just kind of boring: another, somewhat typical, tragedy of the fae folk-contact type.
Based on the story of the same name, County Galway
The Sisters - Liv Little
This one is possibly my third favourite story. It's about two sisters (twins) who are both lesbians, only one came out as a teenager and was kicked out and the other repressed herself and took time to find her own identity. They're now in their mid twenties and their mother is dying, so the story revolves around the one sister reconnecting with her mother in the hospice, while the other sister is spending time with her sister's girlfriend, the two eventually starting something of a relationship. it's a story of dysfunctional relationships, of desiring and wanting to be desired. I thought the ending was a little abrupt and vaguely unfulfilled, but on the other hand I can't really imagine how else it would've ended - and it's a tragedy too, of sorts, as the mother died while the girlfriend and the sister were having sex in a car and so they missed the calls. I read the original story afterwards and found it was about two brothers who killed each other in a duel over a 'useless woman', the ground where the brothers touched being now cursed with nothing willing to grow on it. with that in mind, I went over this retelling again, and while I know that the retelling doesn't have to follow the original plot, I can't help but think the story could've been more compelling if a bit longer, if it had dwelled a bit more on the sisters' relationship. I did like that the girlfriend wasn't reduced to a 'useless woman' but was a person with needs and desires and flaws and everything, but I'd just have liked...to see it all a bit more fleshed out. I think it would've made for a punchier ending, too.
Based on Tavistock Square, London
The Dampness Is Spreading - Emma Glass
Ohh ok this one I actually knew the original folk myth beforehand, BUT not the Welsh version - the Icelandic one (there are several versions of this in Iceland as well, and I've read dozens of them). The two versions are almost identical save for a few minor details. I mention this because when I read this retelling I was unsettled by how it wasn't playing out the way I expected to - I was recognising the trope, for the lack of a better word, and it was being flipped in a way that didn't make sense to me. ANYWAY, this story - a bitter old midwife who has suffered several miscarriages and her husband leaving her because of it, is approached by a man she recognises from a previous midwifery job (when he was a child), whose sister is in labour. she helps the sister, and as the sister gives birth she is transformed into a monster, screaming about how the midwife must place the placenta over her baby's eyes so that the baby might recognise her mother. the midwife does so, the baby stops breathing, she revives the child, accidentally rubs one of her own eyes and gets placenta on it, and with that eye she can see the woman as beautiful as she was before she started transforming. the woman realises this and stabs the eye and the midwife wakes up in hospital later, blind in the eye, nobody in the hospital knows what happened and didn't see the transformation take place.
That's where the story stopped making sense to me, because in the original myths, both the Welsh and the Icelandic ones, it is a salve/ointment, and not a monstrous placenta, and the woman doesn't transform. What the ointment does for the midwife is it grants her sight of the elves (in Icelandic: sight of the hidden things/people) so with that eye she can see the elves as they walk among humans and she can see their houses and palaces and all the hidden things. In several Icelandic versions she loses the sight in that eye when an elf realises the midwife can see her, and either spits in that eye or touches it, or in some other way removes the effects of the salve - and in the Icelandic versions the midwife usually *intentionally* rubs that salve on one of her eyes, so being later punished by losing sight in that eye entirely is very par for the course, as the elves had not originally granted her that favour (though they had of course paid her handsomely for her assistance for the original job). In the Welsh myth this anointment is accidental, and the midwife is rather cruelly punished for it, and in this retelling the elves are made monstrous and even more cruel, and I'm still puzzled about the reversal of sight - her normal eye seeing the monster and the anointed eye seeing the beauty - it makes very little sense to me and it's driving me mad because that's not how the story goes, why, what is the point, what is going on - so I'm just going to shut up.
SO ANYWAY the story was compelling until this weird thing at the end, though also depressing as hell and more like a horror-tragedy than any of the other stories.
Based on The Fairy Midwife, Wales
The Droll of the Mermaid - Natasha Carthew
This is my second favourite story in this anthology - I love a good mermaid story, and this one feels familiar in a way that is hard to describe. I especially like this retelling, which elevated the original myth and centered kindness even more. This one isn't a tragedy or a horror story, this story has a happy ending, this story rewards kindness - unlike the midwife story that preceded this one, where the midwife's kindness in helping the birth is cruelly punished because of one small accident. I'm sorry for going on about it but it just makes me so mad. This story however is just lovely. It would've been a perfect ending to the anthology too imo, so I'm not sure why it wasn't placed at the end, but oh well.
Based on The Mermaid and the Man of Cury, Cornwall
The Holloway - Imogen Hermes Gowar
This is perhaps the most modern of all the stories in the anthology, depicting a family with an abusive father, an older brother who tries to protect his mother and little sister from him - he just got into university and doesn't want to go - and the little sister who asks the fairies to help her. her brother is who told her about the fairies, and so she leaves them little offerings and slips of paper asking for help, and eventually, one morning, the father is found dead on the moor. It being a very modern tale there's some uncertainty about whether the older brother had anything to do with it or whether the fairies did it, but the three remaining family members are, like victims of abuse, genuinely grieving but also relieved - all the complex emotions you'd expect. I like the story, and I think it would've been better placed somewhere else in the anthology rather than at the end.
Based on Old Farmer Mole, Somerset
All the original myths these retelling are based on are printed at the end of the book, which I found very helpful and also interesting.
Overall I really liked this anthology. There were some stories I didn't like as much, some that were good, and some that I really liked. I also really liked the illustrations for each story. They look like they're inspired by Pictish carvings, and I like how they illustrate a key element in the story in a way that doesn't always become apparent until the end.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse and Emotional abuse
Moderate: Miscarriage
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