![]() ![]() ![]() My favorite is "Ashputtle, or the Mother's Ghost: three versions of one story", which first analyzes, then strips and distills the Cinderella myth to its haunting bones. At their best, however, her work, mythic and everyday alike, exposes and owns human ugliness and opens the door briefly to primal beauties. Some of her revised fairy tales from The Bloody Chamber, as has been noted elsewhere, are more amusing than insightful in the light of further developments in the genre. ![]() ![]() Some stories are not so hothouse lush in their verbiage, so I'd encourage a first-time Carter reader to flip past any stories that bother them, rather than putting the book down. Sometimes, Carter indulges her purple tendencies under the auspices of a believably pompous or flowery narrator, but different readers may find that mechanism more or less effective. It can even tire the eye so that it may miss or fail to appreciate inspired images like a tumbledown house "with a look of oracular blindness", a child with "a whim of iron", or Autumn giving the forest "a sickroom hush". Show More in certain motifs, themes and tropes - fairy tales, folklore, the ocean and forest in myth, and others - and the rich variety of topics, settings and structures in the collection was engaging.Ĭarter's prose does tend towards the purple, and while on the one hand it is an essential part of her charming audacity, on the other hand it can be excessive. ![]()
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