Also of interest... in folktale wisdom
White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (Random House, $27)
“Consider White Cat, Black Dog the perfect opportunity to get to know one of America’s most inventive, evocative writers,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Each of the book’s seven stories is inspired by a classic fairy tale. In one, a woman falls in love with a ghost in a dazzling coat; in another, a man discovers a marijuana farm operated by cats. Unusually for fairy tales, these concern the worries of middle age. “Their melancholy is potent, but that only makes them more beautiful.”
Happily by Sabrina Orah Mark (Random House, $27)
“As ancient as fairy tales are, Happily reminds us that they remain living, breathing guides,” said Anna Schachner in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In this “wonderful” memoir in essays, poet Sabrina
Orah Mark frequently invokes fairy tales as she shares a contemporaneous chronicle of family life built around raising her two Black Jewish sons in Athens, Ga. Though the nonlinear writing approach might discourage some readers, “Mark’s brave voice more than compensates.”
Wolfish by Erica Berry (Flatiron, $30)
“In classic fables, no predator makes more frequent appearances than the wolf,” said Lily Meyer in The Atlantic. Blending memoir, cultural criticism, and journalism, Erica Berry’s first book ponders how to live with wolves—both the canines of the wild and their metaphorical kin, such as the predatory male represented by the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.” Her approach “renders Wolfish a wide-ranging exploration of fear—and, ultimately, an antidote to it.”
The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill (Tor, $20)
This 128-page novella “packs a narrative punch more intense than that of many books 10 times its length,” said Caitlyn Paxson in NPR.org. Inspired by folktales about humans who marry animals, the story is narrated by a teenager whose home life unravels when her artist mother weds a cruel, destructive crane. “Woven through with vivid and grisly details,” The Crane Husband “takes familiar motifs and twists them.” It also has “a grim beauty that lingers in the mind.”