In Which Jane Yolen Is Awesome
Feb. 10th, 2012 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSo, somehow, I cannot actually remember which Jane Yolen books I read and which I did not when I was a small child, but I vaguely remember that she was cool. And so when I saw Once Upon A Time (She Said) at the Boston Book Festival, I bought it!
This book is a collection of poems, short stories, essays, and other miscellany, including a set of footnotes to a paper that isn't included. They are all at least tangentially fairy tales or about fairy tales. There are many references to the role of Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books anthologies in her childhood, which brought back some fond memories of my own of checking out The Red Fairy Book and The Blue Fairy Book (er, those may have been all that my library had, I think) over and over again. They were terribly bowdlerized books, but they were adorably quaint and certainly better than Disney.
Anyway! Jane Yolen has some hilarious critiques of the degeneration of children's stories over the years, including some very satisfying (for me) potshots at Disney. She has a couple of original fairy tales, and a couple of amazing retold fairy tales, and a couple of tales that are sort of in between. While some of the writing is serious, her essays are all hilarious.
I can't really give a critique of this book as a whole because the only things that tie it all together is that all pieces are by Jane Yolen, all pieces are somehow related to fairy tales, and all of them are pretty good.
The only negative thing I have to say about it is that it is terribly, terribly proofread. There are typos on almost every page. If I ever reread it I might have to mark it all up. But I will try and avoid doing that because then I would be faced with the dilemma of whether or not it would be hugely bitchy to send my marked-up copy back to the publishing house. >.>
Erm. Sorry.
This book is a collection of poems, short stories, essays, and other miscellany, including a set of footnotes to a paper that isn't included. They are all at least tangentially fairy tales or about fairy tales. There are many references to the role of Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books anthologies in her childhood, which brought back some fond memories of my own of checking out The Red Fairy Book and The Blue Fairy Book (er, those may have been all that my library had, I think) over and over again. They were terribly bowdlerized books, but they were adorably quaint and certainly better than Disney.
Anyway! Jane Yolen has some hilarious critiques of the degeneration of children's stories over the years, including some very satisfying (for me) potshots at Disney. She has a couple of original fairy tales, and a couple of amazing retold fairy tales, and a couple of tales that are sort of in between. While some of the writing is serious, her essays are all hilarious.
I can't really give a critique of this book as a whole because the only things that tie it all together is that all pieces are by Jane Yolen, all pieces are somehow related to fairy tales, and all of them are pretty good.
The only negative thing I have to say about it is that it is terribly, terribly proofread. There are typos on almost every page. If I ever reread it I might have to mark it all up. But I will try and avoid doing that because then I would be faced with the dilemma of whether or not it would be hugely bitchy to send my marked-up copy back to the publishing house. >.>
Erm. Sorry.