Teresa's Reviews > A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

I spotted this slim book while browsing the 'new' shelves of the library one evening. I feel drawn to retellings of fairy tales, though so many end up disappointing me. Because I enjoy Cunningham's writing, I didn't think twice about checking out this book.

I wasn't excited about any of the stories until I got to the seventh (out of eleven), the story titled "Little Man" (Rumpelstiltskin), easily my favorite, which has a perfect reason to use second-person narration. With it, Cunningham does one of the things I feel a retelling 'should' do: i.e., get inside the head of a character we haven't heard from before. Its ending, one fairly long paragraph, was so exquisite, drawing our attention to how someone like him in 'real life' could turn into the person he has become, that I read it several times.

The next story, "Steadfast; Tin", is another that used a twisting of the genre effectively, bringing the story into relevance to a modern-day couple, while cleverly filling in the reader who might not be familiar with the HC Andersen tale of The Steadfast Tin Soldier. The story after that, "Beasts", frustrated me with its standard 'retelling' of "Beauty and the Beast", until I arrived at the ending and the reason for it all became clear: I had been as seduced as Beauty was.

I should also mention "A Monkey's Paw", a very good story: I've just never been a fan of the original by W.W. Jacobs whose title contains the definite article.

The illustrations by Yuko Shimizu are ethereal and disturbing; and I guess because I'm not a visual person, I didn't realize, till I later looked at her website, that I've encountered her work before.

Probably more of a 3.5 stars kind of book, but I've rounded up, because I can't stop thinking of that paragraph.