Customer Reviews

The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors

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I love adult fairy tales, but it seems that all too often, writers pump up the sex and violence to render the tales "adult", rather than more deeply exploring the human emotional dramas in the stories. Maybe that's why I love _The Armless Maiden_. The tales and poems here do include sex and violence, yes, but at their heart is the triumph of the human spirit.

If we look carefully at fairy tales, many of them are actually about what we would now call child abuse. Cinderella was neglected. Handel and Gretel were abandoned. Donkeyskin suffered incest. And there are so many more. And in most of the stories, the protagonist rises above the situation somehow--in the old versions, usually by gaining fortune and position. In the stories in _The Armless Maiden_, the triumph is more often psychological. I read once--I think it was in a book by Marina Warner--that the essential theme of the fairy tale is transformation. In these stories, we see victims transformed into survivors.

These are serious fairy tales for our times, and I recommend the book both to abuse survivors and to those who did not suffer abuse (trust me, everyone knows someone who did). My personal favorite contributions are Emma Bull's poem about Cinderella's stepsister regretting the friendship they never had, and Ellen Kushner's "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep", the story of a young girl in the custody of a cold-hearted guardian, and haunted by the ghost of the woman's unhappy daughter.

This book has a myriad of short stories, poems, & essays about survivors of child abuse. They are all worked around fairy-tale themes but not Disneyified: no handsome prince comes to rescue a child; instead, these children escape through their own courage & perseverance. An AMAZING book. A shame it is out of print--but I've seen copies used & in remainder bins at bookstores so do yourself a favor & keep looking! This book will make you shudder, weep, cringe, but ultimately leaves you w/a feeling of hope. All the pieces are good, but standouts include Terri Windling's, Charles De Lint's, Ellen Steiber's, & Munro Sickafoose's. Another wonderful aspect is that Windling ignores genre boundaries & hence you see authors such as Sharon Olds & Anne Sexton represented as well. Highly recommended!

This book changed my life. I had always enjoyed books edited by Terri Windling, so when I saw her name, it was an automatic purchase. All the stories were excellent, though somewhat harrowing. But it was Ms. Windling's afterward at the end that reduced me to tears. The idea of her going through all that and surviving, even thriving, truly stunned me with her courage. And that is the theme to this book, surviving. When I was done, I sat back and took a long hard look at my own life. And I knew that if she could survive and live, I could too. I won't go into what happened in my childhood, but I had never dealt with it, and it was killing me inside. But after I read this, I got help. Thanks to a kind counsellor, I am happier now than I have ever been. And I have the courage to say yes to life. Read this book. Even if you have never been abused, the insights are invaluable. Also I would recommend 'Deerskin' by Robin McKinley.

This anthology is one of the most emotionally wrenching and satisfying collections of stories that I've read-not just from fantasy authors, but from anyone. Dealing with the darker aspects of childhood, including abuse and alienation, the stories and poetry are full of depth and transformation; magic, despair, and ultimately hope. Some exceptional stories are "The Armless Maiden" by Midori Snyder, "The Juniper Tree" by Peter Straub, "The Lion and the Lark" by Patricia McKillip, "The Lily and the Weaver's Heart" by Nancy Etchemendy, "In the House of My Enemy" by Charles De Lint, and "In the Night Country" by Ellen Steiber. The poems are all beautiful. This book is definitely on my desert island list.

This is a short review.

Actually, this is not a review atall, although I should say it, shortly and to the point: The ArmlessMaiden is a gorgeous anthology, one of the best I've ever read.

This is just a message to people who might stumble upon it in a bookstore or library.

The message is: read it.

You will not be disappointed.

I'm an enthusiastic reader. I read a lot, and I enjoy a lot of books - but not many actually leave me short of breath. This collection (of fiction, poetry, memoir and essays) looks at childhood and growing up through the lens of myth and especially fairy tale. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS IS NOT A BOOK FOR CHILDREN, HOWEVER. (It probably isn't a book for most adults.) It emcompasses a wide range of styles and subject matter; some of the pieces turn a bright, unwav- ering light on child abuse, violence, rape and death. What left me breathless wasn't the ugliness of the subject matter though; it was the thrill of really great writing. Fearless, enobling creativity. Windling even includes statements from the authors about the process of writing some of the pieces; they're interesting, and also provide a respite from the pieces themselves, sort of a "tension and release" mechanism. Standouts are Yolen and de Lindt, neither of whose work was familiar to me before this anthology. I'm thrilled that this book is coming out in paperback, and that it has another chance to find the audience it deserves. (Also that I'll be able to afford more copies for gifts.)

In 46 stories, poems, memoirs, and essays, this a collection of childhood suffering and survival as explored in and through fairy tales, from wicked stepmothers and licentious kings to magical girls and wolf-hearted boys. The Armless Maiden is desperately well-intended, and succeeds and fails on account. Its subject is already prevalent in fairy tales and their retellings, and it well deserves to be collected and fully explored--but this collection pushes thematic into the realm of didactic. Such a direct focus on this theme renders it ineffective: it strips away the magic of the fairy tale metaphor and denies the subtleties of interpretation that could make these stories meaningful and convincing; it hammers home its message with all the grace of a disease-of-the-week or Lifetime movie. Windling's brief, blatant introductions to the short stories only exaggerate this flaw--skip them if you can. The result is too often artless, shallow where it should be resonant, edging up on sensationalized and cheaply cathartic, and simply not all that it could or should be.

Yet somehow, the anthology as a whole maintains a certain effective atmosphere. Perhaps it's that theme does beg collection, because it is so prevalent and so powerful--and so even a subpar collection is, in its way, rewarding. Perhaps its that not all the selections were written for The Armless Maiden--and the reprints are often the best, the least transparent, the least didactic, of the lot. Certainly it's that Windling's arrangement is fantastic--she's a practiced and polished editor, and this anthology flows beautifully: a varied pace (with a particularly superb ratio of poetry to prose) keeps it fresh, while thematic and tonal growth give it forward momentum. I prefered the poems, with Delia Sherman's Snow White to the Prince and Terri Windling's Brother and Sister among my favorites; the prose is less successful, but Peter Straub's The Juniper Tree and Joanna Russ's The Dirty Little Girl are welcome exceptions, and many of the brief memoirs are quite strong. Some of the short stories are accompanied by essays by the author, and while this theme can stand up to analysis, these analyses have an unfortunate knack for wandering from insights to truisms. The exception is Windling's remarkable afterward, which captures the balance between the metaphorical and literal, the implied and actual, of fairy tales themselves and the readers and writers who interpret them. The problem is that so little else in the anthology finds this balance--but other fairy tales and retellings, even if they have a less obvious focus on child abuse, do. The Armless Maiden has atmosphere and intent, but its content is mixed, with a few standout selections but many more which are disappointing. It's compelling and effective at the time, but leaves only a shallow final impression. I recommend it with those caveats: I applaud what Windling tries to do, and would rather read this collection than none--but I would have preferred, and the theme deserves, something that goes beyond good intentions, something more impassioned than didactic, sometime of greater art and impact.

These are retold fairy tales, but not the funny ones. Still, by exploring the tragedy, warmth, and soulfulness of these tales, deeply talented authors delve into the soul and try to find comfort int hese new flavors of fairy tales.

Here are a couple of fairy tales about the tangles and troubles of childhood and abuse. They were all very interesting: stories of an imaginary city that one can only be transported by the West Wind, the seventh little mermaid, a love story of a lion and a woman named Lark, etc. The most interesting story was by Jane Yolen, about a king so overcome with grief over his dead wife he refuses to let his daughter grow out of her mother's shadow. The only quibble I have about the anthology was that it felt so anti-male. Granted, the statistics show that males are the more common abusers, I would have liked to have some more depth in the women who abused (like why? instead of how?). The Snow White therapy session and the ghost dancers story, in my personal opinion, seemed to inadequately describe why some women would abuse their children, while "In The House of My Enemy" depict men as monsters without any true reason. Other than that, they are great stories. But none to be told to your kids in a Disney-esque manner.