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New Fairy Tales review

Posted by Judy Darley
August 11, 2009
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New Fairy Tales issue 3

New Fairy Tales magazine

Fairy tales provide the foundation of most childhoods, but how often do you read them once you grow up? Editor Claire Massey is hell-bent on ensuring we all renew our love of this genre, and we soon found ourselves so swept up by her selected tales that we were powerless to resist.

The aim of New Fairy Tales is to showcase brand new tales, not re-tellings or re-imaginings, and the magazine upholds the best traditions of storytelling, with a rich new host of characters, settings and scenarios.

The subjects are just as varied as any other genre, but a few crucial ingredients ensure these magical moments share certain flavours. There is often a moral at the root of the tale, and a strong sense of right and wrong. Timeless superstitions are given physical shape, with mysterious, half-seen creatures emerging from forests intent on stealing maidens or spreading mischief while others aim only to fall in love. All familiar rules of nature become fluid - malleable according to the storyteller’s whims.

But the main thing these tales have in common is a kind of rhythm to their words that make you yearn to read them aloud. It’s an intoxicating feeling to read a fairy story and let it grip you in this way, filling you with a sense of magic and possibility that few of us get to feel once past childhood.

The key stipulation from Claire is that the stories much be suitable for any age-group, and their eerie undertones mean that they’ll grip us adults as much as the kids we read them too. In fact, some may be too sinister for children, though if you consider the Brother Grimm’s darker moments and much of Hans Christian Anderson and you’ll soon realise fairy tales have always veered towards the uneasy, unsettling and outright terrifying.

One of the best was A Most Ordinary Boy by Amanda Carr, a sweet, self-contained tale within a tale that turned the traditional format of storytelling upside down by making the listener a baby dragon eagerly listening to a story about an utterly ordinary boy, aptly demonstrating that one person’s routine is exotic to anyone else.

Amanda has a light touch that captures the age-old experience of bedtime stories, with the child, in this case a dragon, eagerly interjecting their favourite lines and asking for the whole thing to be told again at the end.

Other highlights included the Mock Mother: a cautionary tale by Vanessa Wool-Hoyle, in which only an erroneous tail sticking out beneath Mummy’s long blue skirt, plus the clacking of a set of big wooden teeth, hint that two badly behaved children are in for a nasty shock.

We also loved the sinister Yellow Jim by Alison J. Littlewood, a tale reminiscent of the best rural folklore, with a skilfully written ending that manages to be both happy and sad at once.

Wonderful illustrations imbue each fairy tale with an extra layer of interpretation, and provide us with added pleasure.

Although the magazine is currently only available online, the wonderful illustrations that accompany each fairy tale made us long for an annual anthology printed and bound in sumptuous leather, a family heirloom to be passed through the generations.

Though New Fairy Tales is free to download, readers are invited to donate to the charity Derian House Children’s House, a fitting focus given the magazine’s ability to transport us back to our own childhoods.

To find out more or download an issue of New Fairy Tales for yourself, please visit www.newfairytales.co.uk

To submit a review of a book, course, film, magazine or website, please email judy@EssentialWriters.com


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