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