Red as Blood and White as Bone by Theodora Goss
My rating: 5/5 cats
I am a daughter of these mountains, and of the tales. Once, I wanted to be in the tales themselves. When I was young, I had my part in one—a small part, but important. When I grew older, I had my part in another kind of story. But now I want to become a teller of tales.
this story is everything that’s right with the free tor shorts. i got hooked on these things a couple of years ago and i try to read one a week. i have only given five stars cats to 13 of them, and a couple of those are maybe four stars cats with wings, but this one earned its five stars cats, and if i could give it more, i would. it’s the kind of story you want to hoard all to yourself for a while, rolling it around in your mouth like a jewel, but then you need to spit it out and crow about it from the highest mountaintop.
i am in phase two of this process now. commence crowing.
i love fairy tale retellings, especially ones that take all the grim, dark beauty of their source material and attach it to real-world situations, giving them a new life and a deeper resonance for a modern reader. this one, while not a retelling per se, has all the earmarks of a traditional fairy tale, while also being cheekily meta enough to address its place in the canon.
I am an orphan. I was born among these mountains, to a woodcutter and his wife. My mother died in childbirth, and my infant sister died with her. My father felt that he could not keep me, so he sent me to the sisters of St. Margarete, who had a convent farther down the mountain on which we lived, the Karhegy. I was raised by the sisters on brown bread, water, and prayer.
This is a good way to start a fairy tale, is it not?
an orphan girl, with humble origins, raised in a cloistered environment to become a servant in the household of a baron – klara is a perpetual outsider, one whose place is to serve, but also to observe. she had been taught to read by the nuns, and her most valued possession is a book of fairy tales given to her by a man who had once lived in the guesthouse at her convent, telling her, “You remind me of a princess in disguise, Klara, here among your goats.” in these tales, she recognized her own life reflected back at her in the core of these stories, beneath their magical window-dressings, and she longs for the happy ending, or at least the adventure that fairy tales promise to girls like her.
I knew about girls who scrubbed floors and grew sooty sleeping near the hearth, and fish who gave you wishes (although I had never been given one), and was not Greta, our cook, an ogress? I’m sure she was. I regarded fairy tales as infallible guides to life, so I did not complain at the hard work I was given, because perhaps someday I would meet an old woman in the forest, and she would tell me that I was a princess in disguise. Perhaps.
klara may never get to be a princess, but she definitely gets her adventure.
the writing is absolutely dazzling – it’s clear and vivid, but there’s something of the old-world to it, in its vocabulary and syntax, that gives it the feel of a traditional fairy tale. it’s so hard to come up with something ‘new’ in the fairy tale genre – there are so many cultures, so many mythologies, how do you even locate new territory? and yet here – this offers something completely new in the fairy tale part of the story that then even more ambitiously shades into a completely unexpected real-world coda that THEN loops back to the fairy tale realm in its last line, where it invokes an existing mythological being i did not expect to encounter here, but makes perfect sense.
I had no stories to explain what had happened.
and i have no words to explain how good this is.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/05/04/red-as-…
review to come, but spoiler alert – it is a perfect story.
