Bonus Review! Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses by Ron Koertge, Illustrated by Andrea Dezso

This one is too short to count toward my CBR goal but I didn’t want to leave it off my review list because I really enjoyed it.

Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses is (are you ready?)  a collection of retold and re-imagined fairy tales.

I love this genre.  I don’t know if it’s possible to have a favorite of any type of book when you love books so much, but fairy tales and folklore are way up on the list, and when they turn into retold tales and urban fantasy, my knees get weak.

There are twenty two stories here, including Rapunzel, the Twelve Dancing Princesses, Hansel and Gretel, the Ugly Duckling, Rumpelstiltskin, Red Riding Hood, and the Princess with that damned pea.

The tales are told as short poems without much introduction.  We know who Cinderella is, so when we hear the aftermath from the stepsisters’ point of view, we don’t need to hear all that crap about the ball again.

To make these stories all the more sweet is the amazing mix between Once Upon and Time and Modern Time.

Cinderella’s stepsisters have surgery instead of their mother hacking off their toes.

Rapunzel’s mother talks about her three times a week therapy appointments.  The prince meets other princes in rehab while he waits for his eyes to heal.

The Little Match Girl is selling her CDs on the corner.  The cops find her dead, but what are you going to do?

A soldier makes a pact with the devil where he’ll wear the bearskin for seven years so his PTSD will stop.

The Beast is a bit bored now.  The weather is perfect, he’s a man again, but sometimes he really misses those fangs.

Hansel and Gretel?  Oh, they are pissed.  So very pissed.

Death makes his godson an amazing football player, poised to win the Heisman.  Things don’t go so well.

If you spit jewels when you speak and your sister spews toads, how on earth to you expect to keep a husband?

When you’re the only one speaking the truth about the Emperor’s New Clothes, how long can you hold out?

The miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin?  Life is so boring after you’ve won a dangerous game.  Surely there’s got to be something much more dangerous out there in the woods.

Little Red Riding Hood is trying to tell the story to her mom, but god, stop interrupting me!  The whole thing was, like, gross?  But whatever.  I let him.  And then some dude shows up with scissors and it’s wicked gay, but whatever, I’m hungry and you need to get off my back, OK?

I love it.

The illustrations are amazing.  Koertge wrote some beautiful lines, but without Dezso’s art, this book wouldn’t have been as good.  The art is all black on white in  woodcut style.  The lines are sharp and deep.  Shadows and movement surround the cuts and you can almost see the red of the blood as it drips down someone’s chin.

Even better?  Dezso is an art professor at Amherst College, so I bet I could go see her work in person somewhere.  http://andreadezso.com/

Hole.  Lee.  Shit.  She did embroidery of things her mother said to her as a child.  Transylvanian moms are AMAZING!
http://andreadezso.com/DRAWING_embroidered.html

I need to stop looking at her page or I’m going to stay up for another hour and I should really go to bed.

In conclusion:

If you like folklore, fairy tales and slightly fucked up shit, get this book.  It’s much tamer than the monkey sex in Robert Coover’s Briar Rose but not purified like Disney.

 

#4: Briar Rose by Robert Coover

I love me a good old fashioned fucked up fairy tale.  Like most of us, I grew up on Disney.  I don’t know when the magic moment came, but the original stories were brought to me and OMFG you guys, it was awesome. I began to devour collections of tales from around the world, and the more violent and fucked up they were the happier I became.  How awesome is it when a fake princess gets red-hot iron shoes nailed to her feet and everyone watches until she dances herself to death?  And when The Little Mermaid returns to the water and becomes sea foam because she can’t bring herself to stab her love in the heart and smear the blood over her legs to get her tail back?  Fantastic. And Briar Rose… Sweet, sweet Briar Rose.  Imagine waking up because you’ve given birth and your baby has crawled up your lifeless body to grab on to your breast and feed.  What in the fucking fuck, right?  Prince Charming McCharmy banged you in your death sleep, knocked you up and took off.

Original tales, retellings, erotica, metaphor, modern day, tales for kids, the familiar motifs… bring them all to me.

And then I opened Robert Coover’s Briar Rose.

Remember up there when I said I liked the twisted tales?  I was not prepared for this delightful nightmare. The tale is told in three voices: Briar Rose, The Prince, and the fairy who trapped them both.

The Prince follows his story close to the letter.  He hears there’s a princess, no other man has made it in to save her, he might be the chosen one, here come the thorns, let’s move in.  Will he make it?  What will happen?

The fairy is an interesting and fantastic take.  When you put a spell on a princess, you better be prepared to hang out for a hundred years waiting to see if it will ever be broken.

And then there’s Briar Rose.  When you sleep, you dream.  When you dream, shit gets weird.  How much of your dream is real?  How much is formed by snatches of conversation?  How does the sound of a room make its way into your mind?  How does it feel knowing you’re about to wake up, but then no… you slip back into  your death sleep.

And what happens when the world knows there’s a sleeping princess in a room in a castle surrounded by thorns?  What happens if a prince makes it in, looks at the girl and then thinks maybe he doesn’t want a wife and he doesn’t want to be the hero, but as long as he’s here…?  Briar Rose has dream after dream of her prince arriving to wake her with a kiss only to pinch her, to rape her sleeping form, to tie her up for gang rape, to have animals crawl over her body while her parents watch… How much is dream and how much is reality?  How frustrated must a man be to crawl through the thorns only to discover that his kiss isn’t the one to break the spell?  What if the seven dwarves appear only to realize that this sleeping beauty isn’t their Snow White?  A young body, delicate lips… waiting… waiting… waiting.  No one can see, no one can hear…

Meanwhile the fairy waits for Briar Rose’s dream self to appear seeking comfort. She tells her tale after tale, waiting for the moment when the girl realizes that the tales are all true.  But she’s a stupid girl, waiting for her prince, her kiss, and her love.  All those terrible things must not be true because that’s not how tales go.  That’s not how her tale goes.

So the fairy watches over her.  Cleans up a hundred years of menses.  Wipes her bottom.  Keeps her hair brushed.  Prepares her body for the readiness of her prince.  They are forever twined together, these two.  No matter how much the crone fairy scares her, she remains the one constant in Briar Rose’s life and she will continue to return to her for tales, but never for understanding.

So Briar Rose waits.  Yet another prince climbs through the window.  Or is this the first prince?  Her prince?

Her eyes flicker beneath her lids, but still, she sleeps…

Coover’s writing is beautiful.  His words are absolutely gorgeous as they reveal the rape and bestiality and incest and hope.  The rhythm of Briar Rose’s sections are dreamlike and disjointed.  As her body is violated again and again, she drifts away into her dreamy haze.  I stopped several times to reread an especially breathtaking passage.  He crafts a tale of horror using lovely language and I could not stop reading.

I’ve read a lot of retellings, and this is hands down the most fucked up one of all.  And Coover’s gift of words makes it amazing.  Another author could have gone for a debasing tale or a twisted erotica or pure kink, but Coover does so much more.

I have no clue who I’d recommend this to.  If you love fairy tales, then go for it, but prepare yourself to love something completely abhorrent.

#28: The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

Oh how I loved this book.  A friend often refers to her checklist of things she likes in books and when she reviews them she talks about what boxes were checked off.

This books checks off so many boxes for me.

• Reminders of my schoolgirl horse phase
• Strong female teen character that doesn’t go to pieces because she starts to like a boy AND doesn’t give up when thing get hard OR wait for someone to solve her problems
• Strong male teen character that quietly and thoughtfully takes in the world around him without giving in to what he “should be doing”
• Kids forced to take care of each other after parents die (Is that a weird thing to “like”?)
• Folklore magic
• Cape Cod-like island life with crazy stormy weather
• Realistic jerks for bad guys.

In a world of sweeping generalizations, boys go through their firefighter stage and girls go through their horse stage.  Somewhere around the third or fourth grade, I destroyed everything written by Marguerite Henry.  When I found out Chincoteague and Assateague Island were real places and there were actual ponies that you could go and see, my elementary school mind bent.  Pair this with my love of Cape Cod and the ocean and thunderstorms and it was nearly too much for my body to handle.  Ponies?  Sand dunes?  The ocean?  Are you kidding me?  Was this world built for me and me alone?

Flash forward to me at 36 years old picking up The Scorpio Races.  Not only do we have a wild horse race, we have freaking folklore horses.  The men of the island will venture into the sea to capture a deadly capaill uisce and see if they are strong enough to control it.  You can’t tame a capaill uisce but you can hope your horse sense, knowledge of faerie magic and strength is enough to build trust and prevent you from being torn apart and left to bleed to death in the sand.

Every November the capaill uisce are raced.  Sean Kendrick races for the love of his capaill uisce mount, the horse he hopes to some day own.  The same horse that killed Sean’s father in the race when Sean was a boy.  Puck Connolly is racing to try to keep her family together.  Her parents were killed by a capaill uisce years ago, and since then she and her brothers have barely held on to what little they own.  She doesn’t care about magic or tradition, but doesn’t mean to insult the history of the race.  She doesn’t have much time, and winning the race is her only option.  Sean, on the other hand, is expected to win.  Even though he’s an outsider on his own island, everyone knows he’s a master when it comes to the capaill uisce.  His only dream is to own Corr, the beautiful mount who trusts him.  When a stranger comes to the island to watch the races and learn more about the horses, both non-magic mounts and capaill uisce, Sean begins to wonder if he should be asking for more from the island.  Puck, simply by being who she is, continues to challenge him as a rider and a young man.  Everything is changing for both of them and the race is going to decide the next phase of their lives.

My two favorite parts of this book are the folklore of the capaill uisce and Puck.  Folklore is almost always going to be a win for me in any book.  And Puck?  She is a perfect mix of confidence and terror as she deals with things she shouldn’t even have to think about.  She both relies on and is infuriated by her brothers.  She misses her parents, especially her mom, while at the same time using what she learned from them to keep it together.  She doesn’t change when she meets Sean and refuses to be the kind of girl who would back down to impress someone.  She quickly realizes she’s going to have to fight to race since she’s the first female to attempt it, and although she is sometimes reduced to angry tears, she’s not the kind to give up because someone tells her she has to.

The supporting cast was just as wonderful as the two main characters.  The balance between Puck and her brothers was great to read because you can see how the death of their parents affected them individually and how they all compliment each other, even when they’re fighting.  The two villains are disgusting and easy to hate, even if you understand why they want Puck and Sean to fail.  Actually… other than money, I’m not sure what Malvern the elder’s motivation is.  Still, it’s good to hate him, especially when he shows moments of almost being human.

The suspense of the ending was perfect.  Both of them had to win in order to get what they want and need.  I kept wondering how Stiefvater was going to pull it off without making me hate her.  Would Puck win?  Would Sean?  Would they both cross the finish line at the same time?  (I would have hated her for that one.)  Would one throw the race for the other?  Would they both lose?  HOW WERE THINGS GOING TO BE RESOLVED???

I’m happy to report that the ending was wonderfully done.  It was heartbreaking and beautiful and I sniffled through the last few pages.  I was honestly happy for these characters.  It’s definitely a group that’s going to continue to live in my head and I wish they were real so I could check in with them every few years to see how they’re doing.