Currently reading
The Rising
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
The Mark of Athena
Princess of the Silver Woods
The Serpent's Shadow
The Demigod Diaries
Scarlet
Curse of the Thirteenth Fey: The True Tale of Sleeping Beauty
The Sandman: The Story of Sanderson Mansnoozie
Perfect Scoundrels
Overall 3.5 stars, with individual stories 4 stars.This is a great collection for all lovers of fairytales. A mixture of essays, poetry and short stories, some of which are original tales and others are retellings.
My personal favorites are:
Once Upon A Time, She Said (poem)
Sans Soleil
Happy Dens or A Day in the Old Wolve's Home (retelling & comic)
The Promise
The Girl Who Cried Flowers
The White Seal Maid
The Moon Child
America's Cinderella (essay)
From The Gwynfahr: "Who is to say which mouth's outpouring will lift the soul higher - that which is or that which could be?"
From Remembering Books: "So I read the colored fairy books at an impressionable age and, quite frankly, have never gotten over them. They taught me about honor and loyalty and truth. They taught me about courage and conviction and control. "Just as good as true" said Mr. Lang, but when I first read them they were better than true. They were in the deepest sense truth itself. They were about you and they were about me. They were humanity's history."
From Fantasy Novels: Truth in Disguise?:
Lloyd Alexander ~ "Realism walks where fantasy dances."
"One must never forget the chief poets of Ireland who had to have:
Purity of Hand: Bright without wounding.
Purity of Mouth: Without poisonous satire.
Purity of Learning: Without reproach.
From Knives (poem):
"Love can be as sharp as the point of a knife, as piercing as a sliver of glass.
They did not know this secret of the world: the wrong word can kill. It can cost them their lives."
And I just love the cover art by Ruth Sanderson. It is not only a gorgeous picture, but it captures the feel of this collection.