The armless maiden and other tales of childhood's survivors Book

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.