Review: The Emerald Circus

The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this Book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

3.5 Stars

Jane Yolen is a revered and highly lauded writer of poetry, folklore, and fantasy who has been publishing for decades. At the outset, we should say these stories are fairy and folktale retellings for a young adult or adult audience. They require a certain level of insight and sophistication that will be lost on a younger child. Many of these short stories have previously appeared in other anthologies and while it's great to have these Yolen short stories all in one anthology that is not the reason you will be interested in this book, at least if you are like me. What you want is the rich trove of notes about the stories at the end of the book. These notes make for fascinating reading and an insight into Yolen's life and world.

Andersen's Witch as story built on the platform of Hans Christan Andersen's magnificent Snow Queen in which a boy, Kai, has a shard of ice put into his heart and rejects his beloved playmate Gerda, takes on a whole new meaning in Yolen's retelling but a new meaning on top of that in a poem related to the HCA story in which Yolen speaks of losing her husband and widowhood.. Likewise Lost Girls gives us notes about the outrage of Peter's inability to credit Wendy for fixing his shadow problem in J. M. Barrie's story, and thoughts about the callousness of children. From Baum to Keats to Dickenson, the origins and ruminations of the stories in this volume are seen through the paradigm of Yolen's world. I do have to confess there were times I liked the notes and their accompanying poems more than I liked some of the stories.


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