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A Guide To Folktales In Fragile Dialects (2008)

by Catherynne M. Valente(Favorite Author)

4.17 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1934648353 (ISBN13: 9781934648353)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Curiosities

review 1: While I love Valente's language (which is beautiful and awe-inspiring), I often felt like I was running just to keep up with her references to more obscure stories classic mythology. The poems where I understood her references or which didn't reference specific stories at all were my favorites, but often I felt like I was very close but couldn't quite get what she was trying to achieve because I didn't know the background she was referencing.My only complaint, which was fairly minor but did make the book more challenging to get through the longer I read, was that so many of her poems shared the common theme of women being smothered, emotionally castrated, and otherwise imprisoned by their husbands or other males. I understand carrying a common theme throughout a collection... more of poetry, but because this was one was so obvious and used in almost every poem, it gave the impression that the book was a single long, epic poem split into chapters. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, I wasn't prepared to read a long, epic poem and so found it mentally exhausting. I had to take a lot of breaks while reading the book, almost as if to catch my breath.
review 2: The first fiction I've read for a while, I think. I'm very much in the mood for Catherynne M. Valente's rich, poetic language, and this ebook was just the perfect type. It's full of poetry and very short stories, fragments and retellings of myths and fairytales. The prose is poetic and the poetry tells stories, as you might expect from Valente. There's some absolutely gorgeous imagery, though in a way it is very, very typical of her style, and unsurprising, in that sense.Probably not the best introduction to her work, but if you know you already like her stuff, it's available for $3 from her site and is worth picking up. less

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