The Forgotten and the Fantastical 4 - edited by Teika Bellamy

illustrated by Emma Howitt

review by Maryom

"Modern fables and ancient tales" is how this book, comprising fourteen weird and wonderful stories, describes itself, and, as with the previous volumes of The Forgotten and The Fantastical, this fourth collection takes fairy tales away from the nursery, and puts them back in their original place on the adult bookshelf. I don't know what it is about fairy tales - maybe that their themes seem universal, as fitting today as ever, maybe that in an increasingly urban, digital world we're seeking a connection with nature, or a simpler time when the world divided into good and evil - but something about them always appeals, and this latest anthology is no exception.




I've found there's often a strong feminist/earth mother streak in the work published by Mother's Milk, exploring the strength of female characters, their bonds with nature, and although this isn't a particularly 'themed' collection many revolve around a central female character, rather than the more traditional hero of folk tales. Several, in fact explore a similar concept - that of women breaking free from the demands and expectations of men, rejecting the 'safe' world created for them, often no more than a gilded cage, to find fulfillment and explore the world themselves.
In Belle/Bete by Renee Anderson, a badly burned woman is encouraged by her lover to shun the world, in order to avoid the taunts she might suffer there, but effectively locking her away from life.
Katy Jones' retelling of 'Snow White and Rose Red', A Beast of the Forest, follows the girls and the 'bear' beyond the traditional happy ending with the heroine choosing to embrace the natural world rather than the fake sophistication of the Court. In Lisa Fransson's The Moss Child a smith tries to keep his daughter 'protected' from the natural world of forest and birds which form her birthright, while Lynden Wade's Sins of the Fathers again features a smith, a man who seeks to avoid the mistakes made by his father and grandfather, and create himself a wife of iron. Rosemary Collins reinterprets Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen into a fable about the perils of global warming, as Cold-Brained Kay (female in this version) goes on a quest to find cold and ice, and bring back winter. Elizabeth Hopkinson's Juanita draws on the life of a seventeenth century Mexican nun/scholar/poet who challenged the authority of bishops and philosophers (all male).

Some of the stories are set in traditional 'once upon a time' never-never land; Rachel Rivett's Wild Man, Holly James' Faraway Woman. Some set in recognisable historical times - A Story in Two Parts by Leslie Muzingo which centres on the lives of those 'creators' of fairy tales - Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. Others bring magic and fairytale characters into contemporary settings - Ruth Asch's The Microwave is a modern equivalent of the magic never-empty purse, The Godmother's Fairy Tale Ending by Donna M Day takes place in a care home for the elderly, and Matthew Keeley's Winging In in a therapist's consulting room.

Susie Hennessey's Lowden House appears to be set in some bleak dystopian future (though in reality it's a place much closer to home), while in the world envisaged by Victoria Haslam in Strange Traits genetic modifications can turn you into almost any creature you'd like to be.

An eclectic, enjoyable collection for anyone who feels fairy stories are not only for the young and innocent.



Maryom's review - 5 stars 
Publisher - Mother's Milk Books
Genre - adult folk/fairy tales

The Forgotten and the Fantastical 3 - edited by Teika Bellamy

review by Maryom

Having seen editor Teika Bellamy on social media first asking for submissions, then talking about her difficulties in choosing which would make the cut, I've been eagerly waiting to read this, the third collection of re-imagined fairy tales from Mother's Milk Books. Most of us start our reading with fairy stories and for me that love of magic and mystery has stayed, but reading with an adult's view the children's versions have all the "otherness" and magic washed out of them. Here, in these seventeen stories, that returns.

As you'd imagine there are many of the familiar 'faces' included - animals are turned into men, and vice versa, mermaids sing their siren songs, children go missing lured away by by an enchantment, a woman is made of flowers, a child made of salt.
Some are set in the familiar never-never-land of fairy stories with dark, forbidden forests where people mustn't stray from their village or a lady from her tower. Others in more contemporary surroundings - an orphaned child with strange eyes is found on a bomb site, the Little Match Girl is transported to present day London, and that fairy tale regular, the old crone, sits on a park bench and admires the youth and fitness of a triathlete. They even transport well to the future - the dangers of a forest are replaced by an airless planet and fairy folk by 'aliens', and our obsession with social media becomes a cautionary tale for the children of our descendants.
The stories vary in length from a couple of pages to a dozen or so, some are funny, some magical, but all are enjoyable, and look beyond the obvious day to day world. I'm not going to go into details about every story but here are three of my favourites -

Dan Micklethwaite's Midnight Riders in which the story of Cinderella's coachman is played out in London's Underground
Sarah Armstrong's The Truth About Tea in which a mother decides to check out the young woman her son intends to marry (in this modern day, you can't really try the pea-under-the-mattress test)
Clair Wright's Spawned, a 'sequel' to the tale of the Frog Prince which underlines that love is really all you need.

Authors; Poppy O'Neil, Dan Micklethwaite, Lynden Ware, Angi Holden, Ronne Randall, Sophie Sellars, Elizabeth Hopkinson, Claire Stephenson, NJ Ramsden, Moira Garland, Ness Owen, Clair Wright, Carys Crossen, Marie Gethins, Rachel Rivett, Sarah Armstrong, Sarah Hindmarsh

Maryom's review - 5 stars 
Publisher - Mother's Milk Books
Genre - adult folk/fairy tales

The Forgotten and The Fantastical 2 - edited by Teika Bellamy

review  by Maryom

In The Forgotten and The Fantastical 2, editor Teika Bellamy has once again put together a wonderful collection of re-worked folk and fairy tales, half-familiar from childhood but given a modern twist


The first story, a not-quite-familiar tale of a little man who can spin things into gold, begins, as all good fairy tales should, with those immortal words Once upon a time... and leads the reader on a journey with fairy folk, spirit animals, selkies, magical manipulative mirrors and, or course, wicked step-mothers, through faraway lands, the frozen North, steaming jungle, modern cities, and the deepest, darkest forest of all, the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

These aren't stories to read at bedtime to small children but ones which seek out the darker themes hidden within the cosy, comfortable framework of the folk tale, often giving it a contemporary, feminist slant. There are tales of abduction - seal-women taken from the sea and forced to live as human, or a twist on Hansel and Gretel which asks just HOW could anyone live happily-ever-after after the trauma of being abandoned and imprisoned. There are stories in which animals help heal a grieving heart, and others which explore the deep bond between mother and child, or the manipulation of women - either by men (whether father figure or the stranger offering to turn 'straw' into gold) or by their own obsession with appearance and image.

There are seventeen stories in all ( a larger collection than the original volume); some are short, only a few pages, others longer; some close to the original (The Worm), others totally new work but within the fairy tale framework. I'm not going to go into great detail about all of them - suffice it to say, I enjoyed all.
BUT, of course, I had favourites.
For the retelling of an old myth - Solstice by Deborah Osborne, about the death of the old year, and the birth of the new.
For re-working classic tales - Rumpelstiltskin by Rebecca Ann Smith, and Reve/Revival, Elizabeth Hopkinson's 'green' version of Sleeping Beauty.
For creating a new fairy story out of fact (if I had to choose just one, it would be this) - Icarus by NJ Ramsden which takes the true war-time story of an attempted escape from Colditz castle and re-imagines it as, well, a fairy tale.  Each segment of the story starts with the sentence 'Once there was a man who wanted to fly' (a classic folk tale device of repetition) and tells the tale of  a man who wanted to be free but is forced first to become a paratrooper, then confined in a seemingly impregnable and inescapable fortress by the Germans but never gives up on his dreams. Maybe it's how myths and legends are made ....






Authors - Rebecca Ann Smith, Lindsey Watkins, Ana Salote, Julie Pemberton, Anuradha Gupta, Laura Kayne, Rachel Rivett, NJ Ramsden, Ronne Randall, Sarah Hindmarsh, Finola Scott, Hannah Malhotra, Jane Wright, Deborah Osborne, Elizabeth Hopkinson, Marija Smits

Maryom's review - 5 stars 
Publisher - Mother's Milk Books
Genre - adult folk/fairy tales

The Forgotten and the Fantastical - edited by Teika Bellamy

review by Maryom

In The Forgotten and The Fantastical Teika Bellamy has brought together eleven writers to explore old myths, fables and fairy tales and re-cast them in a new light. There are some you will recognise; Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella are given a modern twist in Footfalls of the Hunter and Screaming Sue, Lady Seaweed re-tells the legend of The Mermaid of Zennor from the mermaid's point of view, and The Cave offers an alternative interpretation of the entombment of Merlin. Others strike out into new areas - The Sparrows and The Beefworms is a fable about the pressure 'experts' put on us to conform to their way,  Geppetto's Child an exploration of what it is to be 'human'. Some like The Boy and the Bird, The Mother Tree and the Paper House, feel like old folk tales, although I've not encountered these before. And one, The Wanderer's Dream based loosely on a Japanese story, The Dream of Akinosuke, reminded me of Star Trek's Capt Picard's dream-adventure in the episode The Inner Light (geeky I know, but there's nothing new about the morphology of the folk tale and where it can end up)
Now, I know this kind of tale doesn't appeal to everyone but I was enthralled by fairy tales as a child and, from Neil Gaiman to Seren's New Stories from the Mabinogion series and Allen and Unwin's Tales from the Tower, I love these re-tellings with a more grown-up adult twist, and really enjoyed this collection. As ever they contain that mix of morality tale and the fantastical that has kept them popular throughout the years.
It's a fairly slim volume with the stories themselves adding up to about 100 pages with notes on the authors and background to their adaptations included at the end of the book, in case you're interested.
Published by a small independent press, it doesn't have the glossy high-impact cover of something from a big publisher, but, as they say, don't judge a book by its cover - the stories inside are as intriguing and memorable as any I've read elsewhere.

Authors - Rebecca Burland, Becky Cherriman, Tomas Cynric, Barbara Higham, CM Little, NJ Ramsden, Lisa Shipman, Marija Smits, Lindsey Watkins

 Maryom's review - 4.5 stars
Publisher - Mother's Milk Books
Genre - adult folk/fairy tales