The Bottom Billion New York Review of Books
Volume review: Marvellous read of fairy tales through a feminist lens fascinates
Vernon native and author Samantha Knight weaves images of female figures, motifs from wide array of folk tale, myth and fairy-tale sources into a powerful narrative
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The Girl with Many Names
Samantha Knight | Vanguard Press Pegasus Publishers (Cambridge, U.K., 2021)
$20.00 | 252 pp.
Phone call her Rose, Beauty or Snowfall White. Call her the Lady of the Lake, Morgan La Fey, Morgaine, Piddling Ruby Riding Hood, Cinderella, Gothel, Eris or Pandora, or any of the other names she has borne over the centuries. But never underestimate her agency or her powers, her multiplicity or her importance.
That, in brief, is the moral of Samantha (Gompf) Knight's luminously beautiful new novel, The Daughter with Many Names.
Fairy tales and the myths that underlie them are full of women and girls. Too oftentimes these narratives have served to reinforce misogynist, cultural biases. The fairy-tale females, whether evil sometime witches who devour children, wicked stepmothers, goddesses of discord or passive recipients of Prince Mannerly's vivifying kisses, embody and enforce sexist cultural assumptions about what women are allowed to be and about the catastrophes that ensue when they defy those assumptions.
For just this reason, many feminist writers of the 20th and 21st centuries take been moved to retell and reimagine these former tales, shifting women and girls to the active centre of the stories they tell, giving them bureau and complexity. Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad and her brusk story drove Bluebeard'southward Egg are two Canadian examples, every bit is her The Robber Bride.
Across the Atlantic, British author Angela Carter (Angela Olive Pearce) has won critical praise for her sanguinary retelling of fairy-tale textile. Other excavations of this rich vein of reinterpreted myth and fairy tale include Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch: Former Tales in New Skins, Helen Oyeyemi'south Boy, Snow, Bird, Anne Sexton's Transformations, and the stunning collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Male parent He Ate Me, edited past Kate Bernheimer.
Add this name to the growing list of feminist writers who are drawn to the old stories: Samantha Knight.
Knight, who grew up in Vernon and graduated from UBC Okanagan in 2014, has crafted a complex and nuanced fiction that respects the genre demands of fairy tale and fantasy while transforming these narratives into something altogether different. The Girl with Many Names weaves images of female person figures and motifs from a wide array of folk tale, myth and fairy-tale sources into a powerful narrative.
This is a truly marvellous read that works as fantasy adventure on one level, while unobtrusively invoking all the dash, ambiguity and power of the female figures she creates, giving them the depth and complexity so often denied them by male person writers.
Highly recommended.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. While no one would mistake him for Prince Charming, he does love fairy tales sometime and new. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net
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Source: https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/review-marvellous-read-of-fairy-tales-through-a-feminist-lens-fascinates
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