Friday is For Fairytales - The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke

Friday is for Fairytales is a meme hosted by Irena at This Miss loves to Read. Every Friday, you can choose a fairytale you love, or simply find interesting or haunting, and review it or simply say why you like it so much, or why it has captured your attention. Instead of a fairytale, you can choose a favourite fairytale character and describe him/her and tell us why you like them, or you can simply share an experience connected to a fairytale. Fairytales can be old and modern, written by a known author or anonymous, written down or passed on orally, short or in novel form (like re-writings of fairytales), international or typical for your country alone.

My choice this week is a collection of retellings: The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke, whose debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, has been sitting on my bookshelf for absolutely years without me reading it!

This book is beautiful, and I'm talking about the cover, the writing, and the illustration. For me, fairytales in any form are always made all the more magical by good illustration. This collection is based around English folklore, and, having read  a lot of Neil Gaiman, there were many references in it which I understood, as there is a theme of English legends and folklore running through a lot of his work. This made me feel extremely smug!

My favourite story of the collection is a tie, between 'On Lickerish Hill', a retelling of the well-known Rumplestiltskin story, and Mrs Mabb, about a man who leaves his fiancee for Mrs Mabb, otherwise known as Queen Mabb, the 'miniature creature who drives her chariot into the noses and brains of sleeping people to compel them to experience dreams of wish fulfillment' (ahhh Wikipedia).

This collection was an absolute joy to read, and I especially loved Clarke's strong and intelligent female protagonists!

Rating : *****

Review: Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith

This is the first book I decided to tackle in my self -set Myth Series Challenge. There were lots of reasons why I decided to read Dream Angus first. For starters, I am a big fan of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, and enjoy his style of writing, therefore I was hoping to enjoy this book, and I wasn't disappointed. Also, I am, as my profile would indicate, 'into' dreams. Having them, pursuing them, interpreting them... and so I also had a personal interest in reading this book.

So. Dream Angus is the Celtic God of dreams, love, and youth. The traditional story is that he fell in love with a woman who came to him in his dreams. When she would not stay with him, night after night, he stopped eating and made himself ill, until his worried parents started a search for her. Eventually, they found her, but it turned out that the girl, Caer, (also the Celtic goddess of love) had a problem, in that she turned into a swan every other year, and Angus must overcome this to be with her.

In Alexander McCall Smith's retelling, he has interspersed the story of Angus with modern stories of love and dreams. My favourite quote from the book was actually in the Introduction, when McCall Smith says that "Angus... represents youth, and the intense passionate love that we might experience when we are young but which we might still try to remember as age creeps up. Age and experience might make us sombre and cautious, but there is always Angus within us - Angus the dreamer". As I love mythology in general, I really enjoyed reading a story that I had not previously known, and thought the way that it had been redeveloped was very engaging. I really enjoyed the style of the book, as it was very lightweight and easy to read: I finished it in an hour...

Rating ****

Next up: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg...