In her short story collection Kissing the Witch, Emma Donoghue takes thirteen folk and fairy tales
that feature memorable heroines and puts a spin on each one, giving the tale a
different view from its original telling. None of the narrators in each story
has a name, but as you read each tale you can start to figure out what fairy
tale character is being written about. Each story connects creatively to the
next one by heroines crossing paths and sharing their story with the other.
Some of the stories feel almost like reading the original tale while others
have very creative plot twists and character developments. It is definitely a
good read for anybody who likes dark fairy tales and old stories told in a new
light.
The Tale of the Rose
In this short story the focus is on
the youngest daughter of a wealthy merchant whose ships are lost at sea. He and
his daughters are forced to pack up and move to a small cottage in the woods,
where he receives that one of his ships made the voyage safely. He leaves to
retrieve one object for each of his daughters, the elder ones asking for fancy
dresses while the youngest asks for a red rose just starting to bloom. But at
what cost does this present come? The father stole the rose from a castle where
a beast lives, and the deal was that he could have the rose but the first
living creature he saw on his way home would belong to the beast. The story
goes on to tell of the youngest daughter living with the beast but later returning
home to help her father get over his illness. At the end of the story the beast’s
true form is revealed and it’s not what the reader expects at all.
Donoghue does a magnificent job using
the symbolism of a rose throughout the story and how it gets this young girl
into trouble because she desires such an object of beauty. I really enjoyed
this story because the ending has a dramatic twist making it very different
from the original tale and I couldn’t help but reread the story a couple more
times looking for clues. Her use of dialogue in this story, and every other story
in this book, is done with short conversations, no quotation marks designating
what is being said, and each piece of dialogue is important to the story. She
does not use dialogue to take up page space or to fill in time, but rather to
convey information about the character speaking or to foreshadow what is to
come later on. She also has a really nice ending to the story where she starts
to pull back and wrap the whole story up, making it clear for the reader if
they haven’t figured out what tale is being told by this point.
The Tale of the Handkerchief
This was, by
far, my favorite story in the book. The main character is the daughter of a
maid to the queen who becomes the personal maid for a princess. When the
princess is married off to a prince in another castle the maid escorts the
princess to her new home. Before she leaves the queen gives her daughter a
handkerchief with three drops of her own blood on it, saying that no great harm
will come to her so long as she has the handkerchief. The princess and the maid
set out for the castle with the queen’s favorite white horse, but along the way
some treachery happens and the two switch places. The maid, who now is pretending
to be the princess, picks up the ways of living like royalty fairly quickly and
she is comfortable at first. But as time passes she becomes more and more
fearful that the horse or the true princess will speak out against her, so she
starts putting plans into action to keep that from happening. After she is
certain that her secret is safe and she is married to the prince her fears
change when a new problem presents itself.
What I loved
most about this story is how Donoghue pulls elements from the original fairy
tale to use in her story. When the main character is describing her fear she
talks about feeling like a barrel is around her and there are spikes being
driven into her skin. The original tale ends with the traitor being found out
about and her fate of being put into a barrel and having spikes driven through
it. The other hint back to the original story is with the white horse. The main
character talks about being able to hear the horse talk and it telling of her
treachery, which in the original story the horse can talk. I loved the twist at
the end of this story as well, having the bad guy triumph in the end instead of
the true princess marrying the prince. What is also nice about the ending is
the foreshadowing of an event to come that doesn’t happen in the story.
The Tale of the Cottage
Of all the
stories in this novella my least favorite was this one. It is hard to
understand the language at first because the main character has a mental
impairment so the story is told missing a lot of small words to help with the
continence of the story. The story follows a pair of twins who are taken into
the woods by their father and left to fend for themselves. They find a cottage
made of candy and a young woman living inside who takes them in. The siblings
live there while they work for the woman until she tries to cook the brother
like a rabbit. The heroine who is telling the story lets her brother go but
stays behind and takes her chances with the woman.
Besides the
hard language to understand in this story I liked how the tale was told. There
are many versions of this tale to begin with and this story seems to deviate
from a lot of the different versions, making the tale almost brand new to read.
Donoghue does do a good job of sticking with the language of the heroine
throughout the story, which can be tricky to do. But overall this story took a
lot of time to pick through what was going on and made it unenjoyable to read.
Emma Donoghue © Andrew Bainbridge, 2010.
Purchase her books at Amazon; Barnes and Noble; and Edward McKays
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