Over the past five years, I’ve accompanied my mother as she’s faded further and further into Alzheimers. Each stage of her loss has meant adjustment on my part. I started by convincing her that she must give up her car when she drove around aimlessly for five hours when she got lost, compensating by driving monthly to Asheville to get her to the arty stage productions she loved and running errands for things she needed. When edgy plays began to disturb her, I found PG films that wouldn’t insult her intelligence. When she had to get up continually in movies to bathroom, I fell back on her fine dining habit. When her restlessness prevented restaurant seating, I counted on her passion for cheesecake. When her world shrunk and she was uncomfortable going out in the world, we walked the halls of her facility. But when her feet swelled to three times their size, but she still paced endlessly, I was lost as to how I could comfort her.
Until I remembered how she comforted me through my difficult childhood. When my mother read aloud to me as a child, her voice became different, softer and some how magical, especially when she read fairy tales. For a time we could escape the hard time and enter magical worlds. When I grew up and read to my own children, like my mother, I loved riding the waves of words, lilting them, toying with them, delighting in the way they took us to enchanted settings.
And so for months, I’ve convinced her to cuddle against me as I’ve pulled treasured books from my fairy tale collection to read aloud to her. I knew folk and fairy tales have comforted people during potato famines and in prison camps, but somehow easing my mother’s agitation convinced me more fully of the enchantment.
I have been writing down our books by my favorite writers and illustrators for months. Reviewing this list lately, I realized it would make a fine start to magical journeys. Note that while these tales have no upper age limit, complicated emotions like jealousy and greed require the sophistication of at least a seven year-old listener.
My mother is easily pulled into the glory of illustrations. Over decades of reviwing I have seen how many well-known children’s book writers and illustrators bring alive a beloved tale from their own childhoods. There’s nobody who illustrates princess tales like Ruth Sanderson. Her retelling and illustration of Twelve Dancing Princesses (Little Brown, 1990, out of print but available on internet and at libraries ), one of my favorites, was a story my daughter savored and my mother listened rapt as I read aloud the magical and mysterious tale of the princesses who nightly wear out their dancing slippers and the common gardener who learns their secret. Gowns, crowns and golden-leafed forests sparkle with shining highlights. A fern bedecked ballroom boasts architectural details like high arched windows, these setting off the luminescent elegance of the dancing figures. The princesses wear velvets and fur-trimmed cloaks that add texture while detailed woods, bricks and tiles give a strong sense of place. Other Sanderson greats include The Snow Princess and Beauty and Beast.
Other illustrators who you can count for flights of fancy:
I remember my child literature professor in college telling the story of how she remembered amazing illustrations from her childhood fairy tale book. On rediscovering this book in adulthood, she found the pictures were small and black and white. She realized then, that the writing alone had inspired her memories of magnificent images. Like illustrators, tale tellers are fond of remembering the stories that meant much to them in their childhoods. There is a fine art in retelling-- capturing a sense of place, using the graceful language of long ago stories, and weaving a tale that will transport listeners to once-upon-a-time land.
One of the most consistently superb storytellers is Jane Yolen. My mother’s favorite was her Tam Lin (Harcourt, 1990, $6.00), but there are so many others! In Tam Lin, Yolen turns an old Scottish ballad into a tale as she weaves the story of a “strange, forbidding castle with ruined towers on a weedy piece of land called Carterhaugh”. There wanders the brave and beautiful Jennet MacKenzie with “skin the color of new cream and hair the red-gold of sunrise”. It is Jenna who rescues a young lord from the fey (fairies). The romance of language and setting is lyrically set down by Yolen and pictures by Charles Mikolaycak give Yolen’s words the illustrative justice they deserve. Jane Yolen has devoted much of her career to retelling classic tales and penning original stories with settins from all over the world. Sleeping Ugly and The Emperor and the Kite show off her talents.
Other authors devoted to fairy tales:
It’s not just my mother who finds fairy tales comforting. Of late, when I return weary from entertaining her, I have turned to a newly published fairy tale book, one appropriate for young adult and adult readers, Louise Hawes’ Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand (Houghton, $16.00). This is a dark and daring look at seven tales, invoking the traditions of fine words and complex feelings, filling in the voids left by the classics. In “Mother Love”, Gretel, who like her brother Hansel, yearns for mother-love, is horrified to see her brother has “ballooned to twice his former size..propped on his pillows like a minature pasha” and can’t tear him away from the emotional seduction by the child-devouring, deceitful witch who shows him a mother’s kindness. “Ashes” chooses the viewpoint character of the young prince who is dazzled not by Cinderella’s beauty, but by her fresh innocence that defies definition in his “weary catalogue of women” he’s known—an innocence later preyed on by his superficial mother’s manipulations. In these, and other tales, Hawes imbues the archetypal one-dimensional fairy tale characters with feelings that run deep and strong, emotions that will touch the hearts of fairy tale fans and other readers as well.
Next month Wilde will review recent audios for family travel. Have a favorite? Send your recommendation to susiewilde@bellsouth.net