Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dead-serious fairy tales, November 5, 2001
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.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential for everyone, but especially survivors of abuse., January 13, 1999
By A Customer
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!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning, Terrible, and Wonderful, November 4, 1998
By A Customer
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.
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