Review: Finding Baba Yaga: A Short Novel in Verse

Finding Baba Yaga: A Short Novel in Verse by Jane Yolen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"This Is Not a Fairy Tale
Expect no princes*
Expect no magic rings
Expect no glass slippers
Expect no fairy godmothers
Expect no singing dwarfs
                             Expect no dragons."

*Well, maybe you should expect one, because every tale with a Vasilisa must have a prince. But Vasilisa is not our protagonist here.

This is a luminous retelling of Baba Yaga, in which we see the making of a Baba Yaga through the eyes and life of a runaway girl, Natasha (Nasty to some, Tasha to Vasilisa). Natasha has run away from a home with an abusive father, submissive mother and a life that was not worth remaining for. Over days and weeks she crosses tundra, taiga, major highways, the nineteen stones, and a meadow to come to the forest where she finds her voice, her life, her mentor. This is a story of witches made, not born. We meet all the usual suspects, including Kostchai (Koschei) the Deathless, Prince Ivan, the Firebird, and the wondrous hut and speedy mortar. But most of all we meet a wise Baba Yaga who scries and runs a website dispensing occasional advice or prognostications of the future. Who has renovated her entire kitchen with new and useful appliances and who has a sister who sounds a lot like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, with a sticky candy house and filthy ovens that Baba Yaga detests. Natasha sees Baba Yaga as she is and wisely learns from her, in all ways. She sees the beauty in the woman who takes her in and who finds the daughter she adopts to be more amenable than the one she birthed.

Filled with love, irony, and modern humor, this was a delight to read.

Readers of my blog have seen photos of my childhood volumes of Russian folk and fairy tales. (Treasured, since I was five years old!) And so when Jane Yolen's Finding Baba Yaga, a novella in verse, was announced, I was not above begging. Thus.... Thank you Tor.com!

I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Below I decided to reprise my review of Ask Baba Yaga, a book published in 2017, that Jane Yolen mentions as an influence in her writing of Finding Baba Yaga.

Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles by Taisia Kitaiskaia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A few years back, on Fairy Tales News Once Upon a blog, I read about the Ask Baba Yaga columns which formed the basis of this book and were one of the inspirations for Jane Yolen's forthcoming Finding Baba Yaga. Having been obsessed with Russian folktales since childhood you might say I've always been a little obsessed with Baba Yaga (no, not John Wick, do not go there). I've always disagreed with perceptions of Baba Yaga as a one-dimensional evil figure because she was certainly transformative in some stories as you can see in Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales.

I was happy to find that Taisia Kitaiskaia gathered all her Baba Yaga advice into a novella length book. At the interface of Russian folklore and Zen Buddhism, in Ask Baba Yaga we see Baba Yaga as a figure dispensing deep, if occasionally abstruse, advice. Asked "How do I keep from dwelling on the love I haven't had?" Baba Yaga's answer is:

"The life of every being has some vast emptiness in it. Unspeakable, grievous, there is a field in the middle of my wood where no one goes. It is the heart of my loneliness. I go there to dance and be quiet & I love the intensity of its silence. If I were human I would wish to take another there. You must know every contour of your emptiness before you can know whom you wish to invite in."

or

"Why does this one physical feature make me grotesque?" to which she answers:

"All mirrors tell the wrong story." Your cloak-hem has already brushed the ink-pool that mars all of us; the marring of being not as we thought we were... You have made a loveliness of your body through the moving of it & the mirror is a false confidant. Evermore, to be as I am is an honor & a magic."

There is much that I love in this little book and it seems that Jane Yolen found much here, too. I'm certainly planning to read more of Kitaiskaia's work.


View all my reviews