132,615
edits
Changes
From TheBookbag
Jump to navigationJump to searchNewest Literary Fiction Reviews (view source)
Revision as of 13:15, 23 October 2015
, 13:15, 23 October 2015no edit summary
[[Category:Literary Fiction|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Literary Fiction]] __NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Marina Warner
|title=Fly Away Home
|rating=3
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=How would you subvert a fairy tale? You know enough of them and enough about them to do it, so think on it. Would you give a mermaid a smartphone? Would you pepper them with pop stars, and perhaps let them be witness to the Schadenfreude caused by a cave that's sacred to native Canadians? Would you, in the light of their characters usually being routine, interchangeable tropes, give them a closely-observed personality – as seen here in a teacher's interior thoughts when faced with a piece of East Anglian lore? Would you take the exoticism of the east, and Egypt in particular, and see it in the light of a musical teacher on a zero-hours contract who ends up muttering to himself, directing traffic in the middle of the road, or from the remove of an elderly man with ''swollen feet in orthopaedic sandals'' with a message from the past? Certainly these two are not the standard Arabian Nights-styled pieces…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784630381</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jeanette Winterson
|summary=The title story, which appears first, is exactly what it says on the tin: one hunter's story of travelling to remote islands to take part in massive culls of great auks, until they were simply gone. It's always hard to believe that species that once numbered in their millions, such as the passenger pigeon, could go extinct so quickly, but when you read about the brutal slaughter tactics here – swinging clubs and boiling birds alive – you can see how a flightless bird was a sitting target. The narrator makes no real attempt to defend himself: the birds were there for the taking; that was that. Still, he regrets their extinction, because 'in any loss you can see a shadow of the way that you will be lost yourself.' (Those interested in the great auk's extinction may also want to read the 2013 novel ''The Collector of Lost Things'' by Jeremy Page.)
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1473610850</amazonuk>
}}
