Review No.85 – Above

Above – Leah Bobet

Arthur A. Levine Books, 2012

When Matthew finds a girl hiding in the tunnels under the city, alone and terrified with wings fading on her back, he knows exactly what to do. There is a place for people like them, the people who can never belong in the world Above, and for Matthew it is the only home he has ever known. He takes the damaged Ariel there, sure she will be protected. Then comes the unimaginable – Safe is invaded, its people scattered, fleeing Above where just existing is enough to put them in terrible danger. Matthew knows they have to reclaim their sanctuary if they are going to survive. But when their exile has come at the hands of one of their own, how will they ever feel Safe again?

Bobet’s debut novel is a YA urban fantasy that is reminiscent of both Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and the X-Men, and if you think that sounds like an ambitious combination, you’d be right. It doesn’t always quite work – the explanations for where these strange and gifted people come from is in particular very haphazard – but where it does work, it’s excellent. Matthew is a wonderful narrator, flawed but deeply sincere, and the story itself has both a gripping pace and a real strength of heart.

Review No.84 – The Book of Blood and Shadow

The Book of Blood and Shadow – Robin Wasserman

Atom, 2012

It begins with a book – a indecipherable manuscript in the hands of an obsessive professor – and a research assignment Nora never wanted in the first place, translating the letters of a famous alchemist’s long-dead daughter. When she stumbles on the book’s solution hidden there, she thinks it is a passport to academic success. Instead, her best friend is brutally murdered and her boyfriend goes missing, leaving behind a trail of bloody secrets and devastating lies that will lead her into ever deeper into a dead woman’s myth.

This book drew me in with an intriguing title and an excellent front cover, but didn’t quite match up to my expectations. The plot was too uneven and not always convincing, and though some sharp twists kept it moving at a reasonable pace, the writing wasn’t tight enough to make it really grip me. I did like the complexity of the characters and their relationships, with Nora as a strong narrative voice. The Book of Blood and Shadow isn’t a pulse-racing thriller, but it was an intriguing read that managed to keep surprising me.

Fairy Tale Tuesday No.40 – The Twins and the Snarling Witch

This week’s story is a Russian fairy tale from Ruth Manning Sanders’ A Book of Witches and begins when one day a single father of twins looks at all his mending and thinks, blow this, I’m getting married again. So he does. That turns out about as well as you might expect – his new wife doesn’t much like the children and takes the extreme approach to family planning by plotting their murder. She isn’t the dramatic ravens and swans kind of a stepmother, though; her approach is crafty.

“I don’t feel very well,” she tells her husband. “I need a rest from so much work. Couldn’t we send the twins to stay with my grandmother for a time? She is a woman of refinement, and can teach them many things. When I feel well again, they can come back to us.” That mending must be hell, because he agrees. The twins, in their turn, get it sold to them as a holiday with an apple-cheeked old lady in a ducky little cottage. The sister, however, is a Gretel kind of a girl. She thinks it’s a tad odd that they’ve been told not to pack anything. Almost like they won’t be needing a change of clothes in the forseeable future…

So before they follow their stepmother’s directions, the twins take a detour to their own grandmother, the mother of their father. “Your stepmother hasn’t got a granny!” she reveals. “The house she is sending you to is the house of the snarling witch. She doesn’t mean you to come back alive. But be civil and obedient to the witch, and perhaps some help may come.” So, basically, off you go to the witch, kiddies, good luck with that! She does at least provide the twins with supplies – bread, milk, a bag of nuts and a ham. Then she sends them on their way.

The children walk through the woods until they come to a cottage in the middle of a sloe thicket. The sight that meets them there definitively quashes any chance the stepmother intended them to ever come home: the witch is a giantess. She is so enormous that she has to lie on her side to fit into the cottage, with her knees jutting against the ceiling and her head poking through the doorway. And she really does snarl. The children are terrified, but the little girl remembers what her grandmother said about civility, and manages to speak up.”Good evening, granny. Our stepmother has sent us to stay with you.” “And we will do everything we can to serve you,” chimes in her brother. The witch is not averse to this idea, but makes it clear that if their service is not up to scratch she will cut her losses and make them into supper, and the same fate applies to any escape attempts. With those cheerful thoughts she dismisses the twins, who make a bed as best they can under some sloe bushes and cry themselves to sleep.

In the morning the witch somehow emerges from her house without knocking the whole thing down and sends the girl inside to get to work spinning. To the boy she gives a basket and orders him to pick sloes. Then she strides off into the woods, leaving them to get on with it. Only they can’t get on with it – the girl has never been taught how to spin. She’s sitting there staring at the witch’s menacingly huge frying pan when mice begin to pour out of every crack around her, squeaking soulfully. “Little girl, little girl, why cry your eyes red? If you want any help, then give us some bread.” The girl quickly crumbles up the bread from her grandmother’s supplies and scatters it for the mice.

If you have seen Disney’s Cinderella, you will know that mice have secret sartorial skills and a soft spot for harassed stepdaughters. I’m here to tell you that it is ALL TRUE. These mice spin the yarn neatly with their tails and clue her in on another potential ally, the witch’s cat. “If you give the cat your ham,” the leader of the mice explains, “she will tell you how to escape from the witch.” The girl promptly leaps up to go cat-hunting. Outside the cottage she finds her brother instead, standing under the sloe bushes. His job sounded pretty easy, but the branches have a maliciously contrary temperament – they belong to a witch after all – and keep whipping out of his reach, giving him nothing but scratches. The mice aren’t the only ones taking full advantage of the witch’s new employees, though. The children look up to find themselves surrounded by singing squirrels. “What a sad little boy! But surely he knows, if he gives us some nuts we’ll pick him the sloes.” Which begs the question, why does the witch not employ her local wildlife? Is this a payment dispute?

The children exchange the nuts for a basketful of sloes. When they return to the cottage the witch’s cat is there, curled up by the fire. The twins butter it up with petting and attention and all the ham they’ve got; the cat, in return, provides them with a comb and a handkerchief. And no, that isn’t a snide remark on what a night asleep in the woods can do to your hair. When the witch comes after them, the cat explains, they must drop each token behind them and they will be protected.

They have no chance at escape that night. The witch comes storming home, knocking off half the roof on her way inside and spooking the cat. Seeing the sloes and the spun yarn waiting for her, she keeps to her word and doesn’t make a fry up out of the children, but she’s not satisfied either. In the morning she orders the girl to weave two lengths of linen, and the boy to chop up a pile of logs. Instead of leaving them to it, though, she comes creeping back not long afterwards – insofar as a giantess is capable of creeping. “Are you weaving, my pretty little dear?” she snarls. “Yes, granny, I’m weaving,” answers a voice from inside. The witch is walking away when suddenly it clicks. That wasn’t the little girl’s voice! Flinging open the cottage door, she discovers her cat sitting at the loom, having a ball with the tangled mess of linen. The witch demands to know why she didn’t stop the twins escaping. The cat disgustedly spells it out. The witch didn’t give her so much as a fish scale; the children gave her all their ham. You do the math.

Livid, the witch snatches up her broom. Due to her most recent mistreatment of it, it cannot fly too far off the ground, but she bullies it along as fast as it can go. As it eats into the children’s headstart, they throw the comb behind them and it transforms into an enormous forest, forcing the witch to turn back for an axe. This only makes her mood more vicious. She takes it out on the broom, which perhaps is not wise…But still they gain on the children. The boy throws the handkerchief over his shoulder and it becomes a broad river. The broom does not want to fly across; it is exhausted. The witch keeps beating and abusing it as they fly over the water, until at last the broom has enough. “I won’t stand any more of this!” it announces, and tips her off into the river. The children return home to their father, who promptly kicks out his murderous wife; the broom, in turn, returns home to the cat, and they all live happily ever after.

There is not much that differentiates this story from numerous others. The evil stepmother, the witch in the woods, the items of personal hygiene that turn out to have magical properties, it’s all been done before. That ending, though, I love. It’s nice about the kids and everything, but knowing that the cat and the broom did just fine on their own without any witches or orphans at all is tremendously empowering. Watch out, sorcerer’s apprentice – magical brooms are getting their act together, and they have rights.

Review No.83 – The Magicians and Mrs Quent

The Magicians and Mrs Quent – Galen Beckett

Bantam Spectra, 2008

In the city of Invarel, amongst the society of the wealthy and well-connected, the study of magick has recently returned to fashion, but there are many who disbelieve it still exists, if ever it did. Ivy Lockwood, however, knows better. It was the study of magick that robbed her father of his wits and left him like a bewildered child, dependant on his wife and daughters to care for and protect him. When tragedy strikes the Lockwoods and the safety of her family is threatened, Ivy sets out alone to seek out help from the mysterious Mr Quent – but the stakes are even higher than she imagines. Magick is very real, and disbelief is no protection from its power…

The Magicians and Mrs Quent is a fantasy that feels intended as a homage to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, though that frequently goes over the top and veers into caricature. Ivy is easy enough to like, even if her world view is firmly and occasionally irritatingly shaped by her era and class; her co-protagonists Rafferdy and Eldyn are reasonably well rounded characters who grow over the course of the book, but the rest of the characters, particularly the women, are consigned to the background and suppressed by disappointing stereotypes. As a story it is a light (at almost 500 pages, I don’t mean short) read that continues with The House on Durrow Street.

Vignette No.22 – The Secret of Bath Salts

The Secret of Bath Salts

Our bathroom is haunted. It was not that way when we moved in, or else we wouldn’t be here now, let me tell you. We had been living in the house for two years when a tap failed and Dad went all macho-plumber on us, insisting he could fix it. He couldn’t, of course. He cracked the antique mirror above the sink instead and the poltergeist has been haunting us ever since.

I was the first to see him. I was lying on my back in the tub with my ears full of water, staring at the mould-freckled ceiling, when through the fog of steam the cracks in the plaster coalesced into a grinning face and there he was.

I haven’t taken a bath since.

He’s like the housemate from hell. There are always wet towels tangled on the floor, soap left in peculiar places, shampoo bottles left full one night and found empty the next. Taps turn on and off and have been known to explode off the vanity altogether in a geyser of water and plastic screws. He only takes corporeal form when the steam grows thick, but that’s hardly a comfort when a disembodied voice is butchering songs from musicals at the top of its undead lungs right beside your ear. For a while we tried blocking him out by playing the radio really loudly whenever we were in there to shower or wash our hands or something, but however high we turned up the volume, he could always sing louder.

After he got over the initial shock of a ghost in his bathroom, Dad thought it was funny. “He should be recruited by the government in a water-saving initiative,” he chortled when he saw my sister Miranda scurrying from the bathroom to the strains of ‘The Farmer and the Cowboy Should Be Friends’, suds still in her hair. Dad is a bit deaf. We saw the funny side ourselves the next day when a tap blew up on him just before he left for work, drenching the front of his suit with its violent spray. I don’t think the poltergeist liked him laughing either.

Miranda was the one who worked out what to do. She got so angry with his singing one night that she hurled a handful of bath salts at him, and he was gone. Just disappeared, like a reflection dissolving into ripples.

It doesn’t work for long. We have five minutes before he’s back and angry and singing like Pavarotti possessed by bluesy demons, but it’s better than nothing.

© Faith Mudge 2013

Review No.82 – 2312

2312 – Kim Stanley Robinson

Orbit, 2012

The year is 2312. Humanity has spread out across the solar system, a frontier of rapid evolution that has left the damaged, divided Earth far behind. Swan Er Hong, the epitomy of the wandering spacer, has followed the lure of the technological horizon further than most, but a sequence of events are about to take place that will force her to ask the question: at what price?

2312 drew me in with a bold and intriguing blurb that does not, in fact, match up very well to the actual book. The world-building is amazing, backed up by intricate detail, but that comes at the detriment of the story itself – too much time is invested in making the story scientifically plausible and not enough in making it work as a narrative. The result is a laboriously slow plot overpowered by huge concepts.

Fairy Tale Tuesday No.39 – A Magnificence of Mothers

Mothers in the world of fairy tales are often considered to be an endangered species. They have a worrying tendency to either die young, leaving the way clear for the almost inevitably evil replacement, or sink into despairing poverty from which only a magical intervention from their son/daughter/beloved pet can rescue them. What’s sad is that this was not an unlikely set of options for a woman of the times when these stories were first told. To assume that’s all there is, though, is a very common and frustrating mistake. There are strong mothers everywhere if you just look. In ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ the widow calmly faces down a talking bear. In ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ the young mother fights her way free of the contract that would steal away her baby. In ‘Vasilissa Most Lovely’, the protagonist’s dying mother leaves her a doll with secret, witch-defeating powers. But wait, there’s more!

Story 1: Jon and the Troll Wife

This Icelandic story is an old favourite of mine from Ruth Manning Sanders’ A Book of Ogres and Trolls. A hard-working farmer whose wife died many years ago is raising his son alone on their small patch of land, and doing a pretty good job of it. In the spring and summer they work on the farm, and in the autumn they drive a wagon down to the western islands to fish until spring rolls around again. It’s not a bad life. Then one year the farmer falls sick and is unable to travel. His son Jon will have to go alone.

“Now listen carefully to what I say,” the farmer tells him. “You know that the road you must take passes under the mountains. And as you drive along under the mountains, you will come to a high overhanging rock, black and glittering. As you value your life, do not linger near that rock, for it is the haunt of the trolls. And by offending the trolls, or trying to pry into their affairs, many a good man has come to his death.”

Well, Jon does listen. Unfortunately, the weather has other ideas. A violent storm breaks out while he is on the mountain road and the only shelter to be found is that rock he was warned against. Jon decides to take his chances and drives the cart underneath the overhang, where he sees to his horses and settles down to eat something from a packed hamper of food. While he is eating, however, something wakes up in the cave behind him. Did I mention there’s a cave?

“We want food,” two voices howl from the blackness. “We want food! WE WANT FOOD!” Stuck between a storm and a pair of starving trolls, Jon throws a buttered fish from his hamper into the mouth of the cave and hopes for the best. A silence descends, allowing him to finish his own meal and lie down in an attempt to sleep.

By this point, you’re maybe thinking: where is the mother in this story? I promised you a mother. Don’t worry. She’s on her way. In fact, she’s here.

Footsteps come crunching up the dark road, up to the overhang, and there she is: the looming shape of a troll wife, her body flickering with strange lights, staring down at the human boy who has dared take a nap outside her house. She strides over him and throws down her things inside the cave, making a terrifying racket. Then before you know it she’s back, holding a candle, and Jon sees her face for the first time. It is all scars and wrinkles, marked like the mountains, and most importantly, it is kind.

“I thank you for feeding my children,” she says, and carries him unceremoniously into her cave. Jon sees two troll children curled up asleep in bed, which explains the howling, and a large net full of gleaming fish, which explains the lights. The troll wife gives Jon a bed for the night and fried fish for breakfast the next day, and while he eats he tells her about his annual fishing expedition. She knows a bit more about this year’s conditions than he does, though, and the news isn’t good. All the places on the boats have been taken and all the lodgings in the fishing grounds are occupied – except for those that belong to one very old fisherman who never has the slightest bit of luck. The troll wife intends to change all that, and help Jon into the bargain. She gives him detailed instructions on where to fish, and a pair of her own hooks, then sends him on his way with a refilled hamper. This woman does not do anything by halves.

Things play out just as she said they would. The only person who has the space for Jon is the elderly fisherman, who is in no hurry to accept him. “I won’t take you!” he cries. “I have no luck! My boat leaks! I never catch fish! You might as well go into partnership with the devil himself!” I’m maybe seeing why this man has so much bad luck.

But Jon won’t be put off. He coaxes the fisherman into allowing him a night’s lodging, and by sharing the contents of the troll wife’s hamper puts his host in such an excellent mood that the next morning the old fisherman agrees to show him his boat. Jon fixes the leaks and persuades his pessimistic new friend to come out a little way with him. They throw out the hooks and surprise, surprise: they return with an unprecedented catch.

Every day for the next six months, they have the same extraordinary luck. Other fishermen try the same spot, without success; the green young lad and the formerly unlucky old man are the only ones who have the required magic touch. Then, on the last day of the season, they go out, cast their lines, and pull them up empty – the hooks have been cut off. The loan of luck, it seems, is over.

The other fishermen, a tad jealous, find something else to tease Jon about. He has left his horses untended on the sand for the past two months, as the troll wife told him to, and the men believe that all he’ll find when he goes to load up his share of dried fish will be a pair of carcasses. They are, however, wrong. Jon’s animals are sleek and content, and accompanied by a huge brown horse that wasn’t there before. Spooked, the other fishermen retreat, and Jon happily sets off for home.

On his way, he stops underneath the overhanging rock to thank the troll wife. He willingly gives up all the fish that her horse has carried and whatever she wants from the wagon besides. She isn’t unscrupulous enough to take him up on that, but it was a nice offer and she insists he stay a couple of days with her before he goes home. The trolls are leaving that part of the country, she explains. Her husband has already returned to collect the children and she will be going to join them soon. But this isn’t the last time Jon will see her.

“One night in the spring you will dream of me,” she tells him, “and then you will know that I have gone. Then you must come back to the cave, and all that you find here will be yours – a parting present from an old troll wife, whose children you fed when they were hungry. And now off with you to your father, my lad, for he’s wearying for news of you.”

Which is very true. When Jon gets home his father is delighted with all his success, though he’s not impressed by the fact his son not only didn’t heed his warning, he did the polar opposite and got about as mixed up with trolls as it’s possible to be. Aside from, you know, marry one, which has in fact been done. What if it had all gone wrong, eh?

When Jon has the promised dream, however, he sets off anyway, returning to the rock. There he finds an empty cave and a pair of crates bound in chains, too big for Jon to have any hope of lifting. The troll wife has even thought of that; her enormous horse is waiting to carry the crates home to Jon’s farm. Inside is a trove of treasure. Jon and his father live in plenty for the rest of their lives, under the blessing of the troll wife.

But they don’t get to keep the horse. He goes home to join the trolls.

Story 2: The Sun Mother

This Transylvanian fairy tale comes from another Ruth Manning Sanders’ collection, A Book of Charms and Changelings. When they were young the Storm King and the Sun King were good friends, but one day the Sun King comes upon his friend in the middle of a fearsome tantrum, determined to go off and drown a whole country in his angst.

“Don’t dare to stop me!” he shouts. “I’m going to a land where there shall be so much rain that you’ll never, never dry up that land again! Yes, I’ll rain and rain and never stop raining for nine whole weeks!” “But the people will suffer!” the Sun King exclaims, shocked. Stormy by name and stormy by nature, his friend doesn’t care. “The king of that land has a lovely daughter,” he explains. “I wanted her for my wife, but the king said, ‘No daughter for the Storm King.’ Now I’ll show him!” Yeah, totally proving your husband credentials right now.

Being the sane one in this friendship, the Sun King points out that there are actually other people in that land apart from one snobbish king and maybe they don’t deserve to die? But the Storm King is too far gone for that sort of reasoning now. He’s just one roll of thunder short of a meglomaniacal laugh. “I will make them suffer!” he howls. “And who’s to stop me?”

“I shall,” the Sun King tells him, putting on his metaphorical superhero cloak, and shines so brightly over that land that the Storm King can’t reach it without being burned. Every day he tries to get in and is turned back, until at last he retreats to his mountain palace to rage at pompous kings and traitorous friends.

Suddenly, in the midst of all this brooding, inspiration strikes. Every morning when the Sun King flies forth he is only a little child; by midday he is a full-grown man not to be messed with, but by evening he is old and helpless, tottering home to sleep in his mother’s lap. If he can’t do that, he won’t be restored for the next day. The solution is obvious: kidnap his mum.

The Storm King promptly turns himself into a winged grey horse and flies off to the golden house of the Sun Mother, where she is sitting peaceably on her doorstep. “Sun Mother, I am the Wind Horse,” he tells her. “I bring a message from the Sun King. He begs you to come quickly. He is in a flooded land; he has used up all his strength, and yet he cannot dry it. He would sleep for an hour in your lap that he may get new strength.”

The Sun Mother is startled, but too anxious to reach her son’s side to question the story. The Storm King carries her as fast as he can to the entrance of a deep cave, changes back to his true shape and seals her in. When the Sun King gets home that night, desperately in need of his mother’s healing, she is nowhere to be seen.

After that, there is only darkness. Unrestrained by the power of his former friend, the Storm King and his servants go wild, beating at the world with wind and thunder, lightning and snow. Meanwhile, imprisoned in the cave, the Sun Mother is patiently watching her fingernails grow. When they are long enough for her purpose, she sharpens them on a stone until they are sharp as knives, then quietly digs her way out of the cavern and hurries home. She finds her son helpless and ancient on the floor, and pulls him into her lap to sing to him through her tears until he falls asleep.

In the morning, a young child flies from the golden house. As the day goes on he becomes stronger and stronger, blazing with fierce brightness. The snow melts, the rain is banished, and the Storm King is forced to retreat back to his mountains to sulk all over again. His plan has failed, and he is never able to fool the Sun Mother again.

Story 3: The Stolen Bairn and the Sìdh

This is a Scottish story from Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collection Thistle and Thyme, which introduces us to the fairy gentry that are known as the Sìdh. Two Sìdh women are walking one evening close to dusk along a wild stretch of coastline when they come across a bundle left in the middle of the cliff road. When they pull aside its wrappings, they discover that it’s a baby. There is no one in sight to claim it, so the Sìdh invoke the ancient law of finders keepers and take it home.

At around the same time, a pair of fishermen out on the water nearby find a girl stranded on the rocks underneath the cliff. They help her into their boat and take her home to be tended, but she’s not so much hurt as in shock. As soon as she regains her senses, she has only one priority: where is her baby? The fishermen’s wives don’t quite what to say. They’re pretty sure the baby must be dead, fallen into the sea with her, but she is sure that she put him safe on the ground before she fell. He’s still out there somewhere and she’s frantic to get to him.

Her having just survived falling off a cliff and all, the women looking after her are more sceptical. They compromise by sending the men back out to look for the baby where the girl says she left him. This they do, very thoroughly, but of course the baby isn’t there. Not ready to give up yet, the fishermen – who are definitely the sort of people you want to be rescued by if you fall into the sea in an inhospitable part of Scotland – ask around to see if any local found the child and took it home. No one can tell them anything. The baby has simply disappeared.

When the young mother is strong enough to leave, she thanks them for their kindness, firmly refuses their offer that she stay, and sets off to look for her baby herself. She’s sure he is alive somewhere and walks from village to village in the hope of hearing word. Eventually she comes upon a gypsy camp, where she asks her usual question. They have no more to tell her than anyone else, but she’s looking kind of a mess by now and they take her in. When she tells them her story, they insist she come with them on their journey north. They have a wise grandmother there whose advice is worth having. This part of Scotland is full of the nicest people.

The grandmother’s method of search and rescue involves throwing herbs on the fire, watching the smoke and listening to the flames. At last she takes the girl’s hand, trying to comfort her in advance. On the positive side, it’s true that the baby is alive. But she hasn’t any chance of getting it back again. “Give up thy search, poor lass,” the grandmother tells her, “for thy bairn has been stolen by the Sìdh. They have taken him into the Sìdhean, and what they take there seldom comes out again.”

The girl knows enough about the Sìdh to accept the odds aren’t good. She begs for a spell that will help her. When the gypsy grandmother sadly admits that none of her magic is strong enough, the young mother is distraught to the point of being suicidal and the grandmother hastily amends her story. There’s always hope! Don’t lie down and die yet, let’s just wait and see, all right?

And it’s good that she listens, because eventually the grandmother does come up with an idea. “The time has come for the people of the Sìdh to gather together at the Sìdhean,” she explains. “Soon they will be coming from all their corners of the land to meet together. There they will choose one among them to rule over them for the next hundred years. If you can get into the Sìdhean with them, there is a way that you may win back your bairn for yourself…For all their wisdom, the Sìdh have no art to make anything for themselves. All that they get they must either beg or steal. They have great vanity and desire always to possess a thing which has no equal. If you can find something that has not its like in all the world you may be able to buy your bairn back with it.”

So, hope…but not very strong hope. Where is a girl who has barely anything to call her own supposed to find something so remarkable that she could bribe the fairies? And how would she get into the Sìdhean in the first place? The gypsy grandmother can give her a little help with this plan. She lays a spell on the girl to protect her from the four elements. Having done all she can, she then sends her on her way.

The girl thinks the puzzle over carefully. What are the things she has heard spoken of with the most wonder? A cloak and harp of legend are what springs first to mind and that’s when she comes up with her idea. First she goes down to the sea. Clambering over the rocks, protected by the gypsy’s spell, she collects the white down of the ducks that nest there and weaves it into a thick cloudy cloak. Then she cuts off all her long lovely hair and weaves the greater part of it into the cloak as a border. When that is done and the cloak is tucked safely away, she starts work on her harp. She finds bones from a sea creature washed up on the shore and binds them into a frame, which she strings with what is left of her hair. With her two beautiful creations, she sets off for the Sìdhean.

It is a long journey, but the hardest part is when she arrives. Hidden in a thicket, she watches the fairy people arriving. One comes rather later than the others and the girl catches her alone, ignoring the Sìdh woman’s indignation at the presumption of a mortal and holding out the beautiful cloak. The moment the Sìdh sees it, she has to have it. If the price is taking the presumptious mortal into the most secret place of her people, well, okay. The girl keeps hold of the cloak until she is inside. As soon as she is seen a crowd rushes forward to be rid of her, but then they see the cloak too, and it’s collective love at first sight. Everyone wants to touch it, try it on, maybe steal it…

One of the few who remain unmoved is the new king of Sìdh, possibly because he can’t see it properly from his throne at the end of the great hall. The girl makes her way through the distracted crowd until she is standing before him, and holds out the harp. He’s not really interested…until she starts to play. The music it gives is a song of frantic love and desperate longing, a mother’s fierce determination to get back her stolen child. Then the king wants it. He offers her gold and jewels until she stands waist deep in them, but she stands fast: she wants her baby, and she won’t give up the harp until she has him. Even when the king caves and has the child brought in, he tries to get her to give over the harp first, so he can keep both. The young mother won’t be fooled. Only when her baby is safe in her arms does she give up the harp.

The king begins to play. So spellbound are the Sìdh by the music that they barely notice when the girl walks out of the Sìdhean with her baby. She returns to the fishing village, where everybody is kind, and lives there happily with her child for the rest of their lives.

Each mother in these three stories proves that it isn’t easy to have adventures of your own when there’s children to look after and no easy access to appropriate childcare (i.e. when they actually give the child back afterwards). What makes them magnificent is how they rise to the occasion anyway. From the troll wife who pays back a few hours of babysitting a hundred times over to the Sun Mother who escape her prison using only her fingernails, to the young mother who won her baby back from a whole court of fairies, these are women who have the odds stacked against them in so many different ways. It’s worth looking for them; in searching, we find treasures. If you have any recommendations of more fairy tales with remarkable mothers, please let me know!

Happy Mother’s Day for Sunday to magnificent mothers everywhere, especially mine.