In an attempt to both line my portfolio with content, and to hold myself accountable for my 2018 homemade reading challenge, I've decided to repurpose this old clunker to a place to host my nonfiction writing.
Over the last couple years I've tried a few curated reading challenges such as PopSugar's or BookRiot, and while they are by and large excellent ways to bust out of your reading rut, I have yet to complete any of them. So this year I just picked a book published in every year I've been alive. My qualifications were precise: these had to be books I could borrow from a library or digital site, or books that I already owned, to try and thin my ever-growing pile of books to read. I'm not reading them in order, and some years didn't have anything I was interested in that I hadn't already read, so some of these will be re-reads. My goal was just to have a nice, low-stress goal that I could hammer out and generate some reviews.
My first selection was from the year I was born: 1981's The Door in the Hedge, by Robin McKinley. I hadn't read any of her works before, but she'd been recommended a number of times before, and frankly I'm shocked I'd managed to avoid her this long. This collection is four short stories that are either retellings of fairy tales or else original works in that style; The Stolen Princess, The Princess and the Frog, The Hunting of the Hind, and The Twelve Dancing Princesses.
As you might guess, these stories are princess-heavy, which is fine for fairy tales. McKinley goes out of her way to make her princesses beautiful, but not helpless, and gives them agency and melancholy. That said, they're all similar to the point of being indistinguishable from the others. This is particularly evident in the final tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, where none of the characters are given a name, and the titular princesses rarely if ever speak. There's just not a lot to catch hold of here, no real edges, no sense of danger in spite of evil magic being a major factor in 3 of these stories. People fall in love at first sight, and as they have very little in the way of personality, they must live happily ever after because they have no personality flaws to rub each other the wrong way.
In that sense, they're true to their fairy tale roots; what real difference is there between Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella? Between Snow White or Beauty? All are kind and beautiful at at the mercy of forces beyond their control. Before the Disney era, you could easily have imagined them all with the same face, and not been incorrect. Likewise their princes are so similar and tepid that they scarcely ever get a name. The brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson are chock-full of these inoffensive paper-doll characters that glide off together into the sunset of bland and generic happiness.
I don't know if this collection is a fair starting point to the works of McKinley; I'm to understand the majority of her work is in novels rather than short stories. Whether these are representative of her style of prose or whether her original characters get more defining characteristics, I can't say. I'm not necessarily turned off from reading anything further of hers, but I can say I was underwhelmed. For more colorful fairy tale reimaginings I can gladly recommend the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, which at least attempts to subvert the cookie-cutter templates of western fairy tales.
To buy The Door in the Hedge, click here.
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