Guest review by Karen McCombie: FOLK by Zoe Gilbert

"Hurray for stepping out of your comfort zone and trying a genre you’re never normally attracted to ..."

Karen McCombie writes full-time for children and teens. Most of her books are contemporary, but her latest novels – Little Bird Flies and Little Bird Lands – are set in 1860s Scotland and America respectively. Carnegie-nominated Little Bird Flies is an adventure set on a remote Scottish island, with a backdrop of the Highland Clearances, a dark period in British history which saw many poor crofting families from the Highlands and Islands forced to emigrate to survive. Newly published Little Bird Lands – Karen’s 94th book – follows the fortunes of Bridie and her family as they settle first in New York, before a true-life terrorist attack sees them on the move once again, hoping to find somewhere to call home.

If you ask me what genre of film I like the least, my knee-jerk reaction would be to forcefully yelp “musicals!”, and yet Cabaret is one of my favourite ever movies. There are a whole host of bands I’m not keen on, but then I’ve had the chance to see several play live and their music suddenly all makes sense. Fantasy is something I’m not too keen on either, but after my husband Tom read out a pithy review of Game of Thrones in Rolling Stone magazine – “Fantasy for people who hate fantasy” – I gave it a try and was a devotee of all ten series.

Which brings me to my book choice… Tom bought me Folk  by Zoe Gilbert as a birthday present. The cover – like a trippy William Morris print, complete with roses, birds and speckles of blood – was a thing of beauty. But once I read the back blurb my heart sank a little. It was a collection of short, folkloric stories, neither of which I’m particularly a fan of. Anticipating my slight dip in enthusiasm, Tom burst out, “It’s got great reviews. I bet Kate Bush would love it!” Curse him, he knew that would hit a nerve!

And so I dived into the world of a remote island life, with interweaving tales of the community stretching lazily over years, and I didn’t want to leave. Life on the island is full of wonders and it is harsh; straight from the offset we see a playful ritual for the village teenagers go tragically wrong, with youthful Crab Skerry scuttling after the other boys through a cluster of gorse bushes in search of ribbon-strewn arrows shot by the girls. In other stories, grandmother Win is trying to keep her granddaughter Plum safe from the strangest of strangers, little Iska worries and wonders why her mother seems like a changeling, and Verlyn Webbe shyly shows Linnet Lundren his disabled, feathered arm.

One of my favourite stories of the collection is The Swirling Cleft. Young Gad resents her newborn sibling and the shawl of mist that her step-mother Sil insists on wrapping around it, with almost devasting consequences. But Sil isn’t quite of this world; “In their house, there are warm smells, burned porridge and sheep’s wool and chimney soot, and there are cold smells, like Father’s rainy boots, and muddy flagstones and sodden thatch. Wherever Sil has been, though, there is a trace of seaweed in the air, of salt sea-fog and the insides of shells.”

With that glimpse, you can see that the author’s prose is gorgeous. Sometimes it’s simple and affecting, sometimes as plump and juicy as the fruit growing in the island’s hedgerows, sometimes it’s just downright dreamlike and delicious. But always, Gilbert keeps the reader rooted in a recognisable reality, so even the most magical of events feels tangible and true.

So hurray for Folk. And hurray for stepping out of your comfort zone and trying a genre you’re never normally attracted to. After all, you never know the delights you’ll find there.

Folk is published by Bloomsbury. Jacket design by David Mann, illustration copyright iStockphoto.

See also: A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham, reviewed by Graeme Fife

Tangleweed and Brine by Deirdre Sullivan, reviewed by Yvonne Coppard

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles by Katherine Langrish, reviewed by Penny Dolan

A POCKETFUL OF CROWS by Joanne M Harris

"Ultimately, it's a tale of survival and of female strength and resilience..."

Linda Newbery has written widely for young readers and is now working on her second novel for adults. See more on her website.

Before getting far into this beguiling novella, I found myself thinking of folk ballads such as Tam Lin and The Demon Lover and hearing the voices of Maddy Prior, Martin Carthy and Sandy Denny. On finishing, I looked up The Child Ballads, 295, which inspired it (I am as brown as brown can be / And my eyes as black as sloe; I am as brisk as brisk can be / An wild as forest doe) and found that both Maddy Prior (with Steeleye Span) and Martin Carthy have indeed made recordings; I've added the link to the Steeleye Span version at the end of this piece, and you can listen to Martin Carthy on Spotify.

The story is steeped in folklore, from references to Jack-in-the-Green, the May Queen and the Winter King to the passing of the months marked by their moons: Hunter's Moon, Blood Moon and others, each carrying its own superstitions. We're in territory familiar from folk ballads - love, death, betrayal and revenge, and bewitchment by a creature not human but faery. Here our perspective is that of the enchanter, who to regain her true self must in turn free herself from bewitchment. 

"I have no name," this bonny brown girl tells us. "The travelling folk have neither name nor master. A named thing is a tamed thing." But when given a name by her human lover, she loses her power of shape-shifting, of taking on animal forms - hare, vixen, frog or nightingale, as she chooses. After the young aristocrat William names her Malmuira, meaning Dark Lady of the Mountains, she thinks: "I wear (my name) like a golden crown. I wear it like a collar ... I am a wild bird in a snare;" and is restlessly limited to her own self. 

There are inherent dangers in romances between mortals and faerie folk, as Katherine Langrish describes in an eloquent and wide-ranging piece in Seven Miles of Steel Thistles*. "Whether mortals woo, ravish or capture supernatural women, whether mortals themselves are carried off or seduced, marrying a fairy bride nearly always leads to grief at best, to death at worst." Our bonny brown girl is both enchanted and enchantress, destined to fall in love with William, and he with her, from the moment she picks up the adderstone, a love-charm left by a village girl at the hawthorn tree that stands within a stone circle.

Inevitably, their love is short-lived: "My love he was so high and proud / His fortune too so high / He for another pretty maid / Me left and passed me by."  Our bonny brown girl, though, isn't going to retreat to her woodland cave to pine and die: in the form of a wolf she has ripped out the throats of sheep, so we know she can be ruthless. Now she plans revenge, with the help of hawthorn - an ageless female figure who gives her a seemingly impossible spell (bringing to mind another folk ballad, Scarborough Fair) by which she can free herself of her bond to William, and punish him. William has tangled with the traveller folk at high risk to himself.

Ultimately, it's a tale of survival and of female strength and resilience. Who is that village girl? Who is hawthorn? And who is the white-headed crow, our bonny brown girl's companion and messenger as she goes into exile, accused of witchcraft? It all comes together both surprisingly and satisfyingly. 

Many readers will know Joanne Harris from her very popular Chocolat, Gentlemen and Players and others. As Joanne M Harris she writes stories inspired by mythology, and here she has found a sure-footed style which is lyrical without being indulgent. "I have no need of silks and furs. I have no need of servants. I have the silk of the dragonfly's wing, the snowy coat of the winter hare. I have the gold of the morning sun, the colours of the Northlights." Fine pencil drawings by Bonnie Helen Hawkins show animals and vegetation in realistic detail - I was particularly impressed by the wolves, and by William on his rearing horse - while for characters she doesn't go for Burne-Jones-like ethereality but for expressive, vivacious faces which could be those of modern teenagers. Gollancz have made this beautiful little book a pleasure to handle.

A Pocketful of Crows is published by Gollancz.

Listen to Steeleye Span: The Brown Girl

Katherine Langrish's Seven Miles of Steel Thistles is published by Greystones Press, reviewed for Writers Review by Penny Dolan here.

Guest Review by Penny Dolan: SEVEN MILES OF STEEL THISTLES, Reflections on Fairy Tales, by Katherine Langrish

 

"A most thoughtful and personal guide to the world of folk and fairy stories and, to me and maybe to others, a wise reminder of tales that need re-reading."

 Penny Dolan works as a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on the History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and also on The Cranky Laptop Writes, her personal blog.  For more, see www.pennydolan.com

 

I’ve followed Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, Katherine Langrish’s folk and fairy tale blog, since she began it back in 2009. She chose the title - a story warning of difficulties waiting on the long journey ahead - as an apt phrase for setting out on her blogging adventure, but word spread and the blog became both well-respected and successful.

 

Yet blogs are ephemeral things and, as Langrish says, “Day by day, week, by week, the posts disappear from view like falling leaves and who goes looking for them again?”

 

However, Langrish has collected some of her on-screen reflections and offers them, with a richness and a pleasing randomness, within the paperback pages of Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, so one can go looking again. The chapters, revised and developed, still keep the light and friendly tone of the original posts; reading the paperback feels rather like listening to the author in conversation with you, and that is a good thing.

Katherine Langrish, a children’s author “by trade and vocation”, describes a childhood filled with Andrew Lang’s Colour Fairy Books, the Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm’s and such tales and understanding that similar stories occur across a variety of voices and cultures, both high and low.

 

As she explains in the Introduction: “the field of fairy stories, legend, folktales and myths is like a great, wild meadow. The flowers and grasses seed everywhere, boundaries are impossible to maintain. Wheat grows in to the hedge from the cultivated crops nearby and poppies spring up in the middle of the oats. A story can be both things at once . . .”  

 

The book is arranged in three parts. In the first, ON FAIRY TALES, she muses on topics such as ill-fated bargains made with fairy brides, the significance of colour within folk tales and our human need for dragons, as well as the useful magic of such labour-saving objects as porridge pots. I very much welcomed her sound, spirited argument on behalf of fairy-tale heroines, whose actions “tell us to be active, to use our wits, to be undaunted”, even as - through stories of enchanted youths like Thomas the Rhymer, Tam Lin, and others - she opens up a fairyland that is not filled with dancing children but a cold Otherworld one door away from hell.

 

In the second section, REFLECTIONS OF SIMPLE TALES, Langrish looks more deeply into single tales. Her essay on Briar Rose steps past the sleeping princess, and in to “stopped time” and the beauty of that “whole little jewelled world frozen and forgotten.” I was particularly interested, as an occasional storyteller, in Langrish’s long pondering on The Juniper Tree. What makes this story “tellable” to older children, she feels, is that - despite murder and cannibalism – the horror is balanced by  innocence and hope. In other chapters, she describes her thoughts as she traces stories through oral records, fragments of text or literary versions and adaptation, whether a rambling County Mayo tale or 18^th & 19^th Century collectors work on the enigmatic Great Selchie of Sule Skerry ballad.  She also reveals the relationship between this work and her need to understand the deep, emotional heart of a story when writing her novels for children: Troll Fell, Troll Mill, Troll Blood , Dark Angels and Forsaken.

In the third section, Katherine Langrish uses her FOLK TALES section to reflect on a variety of themes and beliefs, from the wisdom of fools and simpletons to homely hobs and fairies. She writes of transformations, of pale “white ladies” and also about ghostly apparitions that just are, “happenings” and encounters without any plot or story. She looks into our relationship with water, suggesting that many legends and stories suggest echoes of ancient beliefs in water goddesses and offerings of “drowned” tributes.

 

Finally, with the end of the book, comes HAPPILY EVER AFTER, and little need to say more or to explain. With “once upon a time”, she says, the storyteller alerted the audience and now all is done. Ritual words of ending show that the teller is not pausing for a twist or reversal of fortune but mark that the time of the tale is over, even if - through the closing phrases Langrish offers – one is suggesting that none of it was true.

 

I found SEVEN MILES OF STEEL THISTLES  a most thoughtful and personal guide to the world of folk and fairy stories and, to me and maybe to others,  a wise reminder of tales that need re-reading and - through the footnotes and bibliography - references to follow   up. Her defence of such simple stories is sturdy, advising the reader that “Fairy stories are not to be appreciated as a novel. There is no building up of character’s inner lives”, and quoting C.S. Lewis’s views on the simplicity of such narratives: “To the good reader’s imagination, such statements of bare facts are often the most evocative of all.”

 

I want to finish with three points. The first is that, although I know Katherine, I had already bought a copy of this paperback book for myself, well before writing this review. The second is to celebrate the fact that a new publishing house, The Greystones Press, set up by Mary Hoffman & Steve Barber, chose to publish SEVEN MILES OF STEEL THISTLES, and finally to add that Katherine Langrish’s distinctive and beautiful writing style made reading this book a pleasure.

 

And - this time truly – not a word of a lie!

 

Penny Dolan