6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good to read, good to see, December 8, 2001
This review is from: Beauty and the Serpent: Thirteen Tales of Unnatural Animals (Hardcover)
This is a finely crafted interweaving of interesting stories about unnatural animals - some super, and a few infra natural - into a narrative about student, teacher and librarian interactions over the course of a school year. The narrative is structured as a ring composition, beginning with an outrageous teenager meeting an adult, the librarian, who is her equal in outrageousness, and ending with a cautionary tale told by the librarian, that may hit home with the teen-ager, but plainly shows that the librarian herself is beyond the help of cautionary tales.
In between are a number of cracking good yarns, beautifully illustrated with 13 full page wood engravings, well worth the price of the book by themselves alone. I liked them so much I looked the artist up on the web, and found the prints can be purchased at reasonable prices. What a great Christmas gift for a 12 or 13 year old! A good book and an original print!
The stories range from simple ghost stories (Ghost Story, Haunted House) to moralizing tales about the ill effects of meanness, accidental, immature, or habitual (Father's Foxy Neighbor, Snakefeathers, A Conveyance of Lions).
One finds an Australian aboriginal myth about the origin of crows and mockingbirds transposed into modern suburbia, an African tale about bestial births transposed into a modern city. In addition to the animal theme running through these - often old, and some well known - stories, the narrative's bringing them into direct relation to the people telling them is the book's main characteristic. It can be a charming one, as when a boy in love with a teacher finds out the she herself is the descendant of a woman who was once a fish, or a horrifying one, as we learn that the vice principal himself is the anti-hero of a tale he tells about a childhood bully.
Only one moment in the book disappointed me, to the point of real anger. The pompous Language Arts teacher says, "I wrote my doctoral thesis on Chaucer. Why should I care about some ancient tales of talking animals." Had someone somewhere else in the book pointed out that Chaucer was a wonderful tale teller, not least of all in his wonderful tale of Chaunticleer, the talking rooster and his brides, this passage would have been a wonderful sendup of teacher, a stroke of ironic genius. As it is, the book's readers may be left thinking that Chaucer is as pompous an ass as Dr. Proctor (pun no doubt intended), and end up missing out on one of life's greatest pleasures. No doubt the learned Barbara Ann Porte intended the irony, but I wish she had made it available to her 12 and up readers.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Hmmm, February 2, 2004
This review is from: Beauty and the Serpent: Thirteen Tales of Unnatural Animals (Hardcover)
This book has received glowing praise from a number of respected journals, yet I find it difficult to see where the praise is coming from. I used to work for a magazine (albeit an unimportant one) and the stories in this collection are a lot like the things we turned away.
The stories are indeed creepy, and eerie, and strange -- but with no obvious purpose other than that of making readers go "Oooh, look at how creepy, and eerie, and strange that is!" The author alternates between leaving out so much detail that readers are left scrambling to figure out just what she means by each obscure allusion, to hitting readers over the head with so many blatant "twists" it gives one a headache. In short, she tries too hard, and yet not hard enough.
For example, in the first story the librarian embarks on what is theoretically a cautionary tale about not picking up other people's garbage. The story starts with a frazzled babysitter trying to silence an unhappy baby by giving it a pacifier she finds lying on the sidewalk. This belonged to a 'puppy-from-hell' and the side effect of using it on a human child is that the child takes on the qualities of a demonic dog. Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? But suddenly the story splits into several different directions. There is a long bit about what becomes of the puppy, about how the baby grows up, is killed, goes to hell and becomes a really great demon, and about how thrilled the devil is to have caused all this trouble. The story loses sight altogether of the babysitter who set off the whole mess in the first place. Going from the thoughtful reaction of the teenage girl who hears the tale, there WAS a moral to the story buried in there somewhere, but I'm not going to go looking for it.
The rest of the book devolves from there.
The stories might actually be interesting for their own sakes (disregarding the glaring lack of originality of some of them; "Ghost Story" comes to mind), but the author is so determined to wring lessons and morals and those inane 'twists' out of them that I found myself more bored than engaged.
There is only one exception, the tale after which the book is named (and for good reason, as it's the best one). "Beauty and the Serpent" is a creepy story that starts with a naive, religious young woman named Bathsheba, follows her around while she grows up, and then ends with dramatic happenings centering on her daughter, Beauty.
The tale is well-developed, soundly grounded (insofar as a weird fantasy-cult-religion hybrid story can be grounded), and delightfully complex. I object only to what appears to be a meaningless introduction into the story of a couple of unusually freakish Mormons.
Something in the way the author depicts them makes it sound as though the word "Mormon" were an epithet, and as if the freakishness of her two characters came naturally to the members of the entire religion (rather in the way some people think terrorism is a genetic trait of every one in the Middle East). I have strong reservations about that sort of unwarranted bigotry. It marred what might otherwise have been a fun story.
Perhaps all of the tales have some sort of Higher Meaning, and I am merely too obtuse and ignorant to grasp them. If anyone has any clearer ideas on the book, please enlighten me. (Those who plan to argue solely by jabbing indignant fingers at those brilliant reviews from respected journals need not apply.)
For the time being, my opinion of the book remains low.
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