torts's reviews
1699 reviews

Most of one star off because the first two stories failed to grab my attention and felt like interminable bores (especially compared to the rest of the stories, which were almost invariably beautiful). (These are the most explicitly Orsinian ones, and probably appeal to people who love The Silmarillion and Dune and Game of Thrones. I just don't like world-building and lore for its own sake...)

-"Brothers and Sisters" didn't really grab me... too much mundane detail about too many characters and not enough to dig into, plot-wise.

-"A Week in the Country." MORE LIKE A *BLEAK* IN THE COUNTRY.

-"Unlocking the Air" is prettier and less linear than the previous two stories, but still feeling pretty mundane. At first I thought this was what Le Guin had meant in her intro about reusing names, since it seemed to pick up names/relationships from the previous story.

-"Imaginary Countries" has more of a fairy-tale feel than "Unlocking the Air" but still left me feeling like this book of short stories was a bit dreary... maybe this one would have been improved if the unicorn trap had gotten more use?

-"The Diary of the Rose" is five-star dystopia storytelling.

-"Direction of the Road" is another standout. Loved the way the

tree's

perception of

space and time

was not human. Highlights: "Eternity is none of my business." and the entire final paragraph.

-"The White Donkey" is cute. Calling a unicorn "a kind of god donkey" made me see unicorns in a new way, much like how

the tree's perspective

in "Direction of the Road" made me think about movement/4th-dimensional-existence in a new way.

-"Gwilan's Harp" is the lovely sort of pastoral story I wanted the first few stories in this collection to be. A simple tale about love and music and aging and perseverance, desolate but hopeful.

-"May's Lion" is another one (like "Direction of the Road") with a beautiful final paragraph. The metanarrative of telling one storyteller's version of a story and then honoring her by telling another version made me kind of sad, but in a life-is-sad-and-art-is-a-beautiful-paradox kind of way.

-Reading "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" was bizarre, like being lost in a dream with fairytale animals.

-"Horse Camp"

twists the meaning of the term "horse girl" and made me immediately flip back and reread it to see the pivot.

-"The Water Is Wide" is pretty, but too sad/morbid for me to want to dwell on it... this time the pivoting perspectives were confusing, which felt like the point. Reminded me slightly of "The Diary of the Rose" though, which makes me think maybe I should go back and dwell on it more, just in case there's more dystopia and less tragic-loss to pick apart.

-"The Lost Children" is a short and simple retelling of the Pied Piper story, with some poetic descriptions of the feeling of being pulled to the piper and the ultimate fate of the children.

-Reading "Texts" was the first time I caught explicit mention of Portland, which was kind of exciting because I was partly inspired to seek out some Le Guin to read after hearing someone talk about how he was reading her work while in Portland, down the street from specific places she was mentioning in her writing. Puzzling poetry. (The story itself, not the me-noticing-Portland.)

-"Sleepwalkers" is a devastating chain of narratives. More Portland, too.

-"Hand, Cup, Shell" is very To the Lighthouse-y: free indirect discourse, waves of perspective in a beachy setting, Woolfish meditations on aging and death and meaning.

-"Ether, OR" is another serial (Portland-reference-laden) chain of stories with some horrific details about children and serial killing thrown in near the end (like in

"Sleepwalkers"

). Less of a chain and more of an interconnected weaving of voices of the titular town (a chain-link-fence?).

-"Half Past Four" was feeling even more To the Lighthouse-y, but then the way the names were popping up was disorienting me in a way that was The Sound and the Fury-y. Even having read the introduction it still took me most of the way through the set of mini-stories to accept that the characters were just picking up the same names and similar identities, and weren't actually (intended to be) interrelated anecdotes about one family.

pretty melancholy

I seldom write in my books, but something about the way Angela Carter was writing about other people's writing made me want to write around her writing...

My scattered thoughts:
I don't know if this print run had a page missing or if it was just my copy, but my table of contents cut off about halfway through, right after "Elizabeth David: <i>English Bread and Yeast Cookery</i>". Fitting, because that was perhaps the last piece in the book that I fully enjoyed... it kicked off with some navel-gazey puttering from Carter that included the statement that "I used to feel so womanly when I was baking my filthy bread." And it had this gem of a section on Virginia Woolf near the end: "Although otherwise an indifferent cook, Virginia could certainly knock you up a lovely cottage loaf. You bet. This strikes me as just the sort of pretentiously frivolous and dilettantish thing a Bloomsbury <i>would</i> be good at -- knowing how to do one, just one, fatuously complicated kitchen thing and doing that one thing well enough to put the cook's nose out of joint."

The Tomato Woman section was definitely the one I enjoyed the most. How could I not love a section that kicks off with a cheeky epigraph from Claude Levi-Strauss? ("To eat is to fuck.")

The absolute best part (in the Tomato Woman section, of course): at the end of "<i>An Omelette and a Glass of Wine</i> and Other Dishes" there are three pieces of "interesting correspondence" absolutely demolishing Angela Carter for her self-righteous takedown of Alice Waters. They call out Carter's "puritanical contempt for decently prepared food" and her "difficult to follow" argument against Waters's enjoyment of food/foodie identity. Something about these letters being presented as "interesting" without any further context tickled me. Like she almost wanted to admit they were right? Or she thought they were hilariously wrong? Or were they added after her death, by the "friend" who edited the selected writings? (Scare quotes around friend because what kind of friend would include those rebuttals after Carter no longer had the ability to snark back?) It also tickled me that the piece immediately after "<i>An Omelette and a Glass of Wine</i> and Other Dishes" was a piece where she lovingly described the history of the potato. As counter-evidence to those three correspondences? To show she'd taken their criticism to heart and spent the next two years learning to really appreciate potatoes the way a foodie should? To prove that she didn't hate food/food-writers, just the way Alice Waters positioned herself as a "foodie"?

Less thrillingly, Iaian Sinclair's response to what Angela Carter wrote about <i>Downriver</i> was included at the end of that piece. He does take issue with some of the points she makes, but he's much less confrontational and the response is therefore much less fun to read. And it wasn't in the Tomato Woman section, so I'd already lost interest.

This tiny book took me a decade to get through. I was really enjoying it at first! (Relishing it! Comparing Carter to Borges!) But then I put it aside and the Contents disappeared and so did my interest.

Technically I only read Valente's contribution:
https://www.tor.com/2022/11/23/the-difference-between-love-and-time-catherynne-m-valente/

I'm glad I skipped Marina Warner's introduction and went back to read it to contextualize the stories once I finished, since I think it might've spoiled some of the charm to know the fairytale parallels or the intended social critiques. I still didn't spend much time reading some of the more obscure stories (and mostly skimmed the poetry, including the songs within the Kate Crackernuts play), but I enjoyed enough of the stories to merit somewhere around four stars for pretty prose, female-led fantastical adventures, and interesting retellings of some classic fairy tales. My favorites:
*The Fourth Pig: I

didn't see the WWII foresight that Warner mentioned in her introduction, but I

enjoyed the extended metaphor of the pig's fear of the wolf (with the pig as a sort of stand-in for humanity).
*Hansel and Gretel: Sadly realistic and not too similar to the story it gets its title from, but recognizable in a way other stories (and poems) weren't.
*The Snow Maiden: Maybe too sad, but not at all unrealistic

in its portrayal of a woman who gave up her passion for academics in order to fulfill an expected role as wife/mother

. Probably could use a trigger warning because

the protagonist ends up with the man who assaulted her

, but it's pretty clear that it's going to be a dark story about the limitations placed on women's lives so it's not exactly surprising.
*Soria Maria Castle: Up there with The Fourth Pig when it comes to lovely and kind of brutal nature-focused prose. A better witch than Hansel and Gretel, and I loved the descriptions of the transformations and the playful frame

of the sand castle

.
*Kate Crackernuts: I

didn't notice the Twelve Dancing Princesses frame that Warner pointed out in the introduction, but I could definitely see the Goblin Market parallels. I

liked the female-led adventuring and the foregrounding of sisterly love

, and I didn't really feel like the heterosexual happy endings undermined the female agency the way Warner somewhat implied (or at least the way I might have interpreted Warner's parallel to the Goblin Market with the caveat about Mitchison adding heterosexuality, had I read the intro before the story)

.
*Adventure in Debateable Land: Kind of reminded me of Shrek and The Phantom Tollbooth, but a little less accessible. Could be worth rereading with less skimming.
*The Little Mermaiden: One of the more recognizable fairy tale retellings, and probably the only way I'll ever be able to stomach the "original" little mermaid story

(with the walking-on-glass and the turning-to-seafoam elements)

. I liked the perspective she chose to tell the story from, and appreciated the appropriately monstrous mermaids.

I'm not sure how many stars to give this, but it was beautiful and disturbing and kind of perplexing... the movie did a great job of capturing all those things (and i'm probably equally unlikely to reread/continue the series as I am to rewatch the movie).