kissing the witch old tales in new skins

These are real fearsĪnd real dangers girls confront when puberty begins to morph them into women.īiology needn't be destiny. ''Some days he called me daughter others, lover others, his beauty'' and so the princess runs away from her father, the king. To the top of a tower, like a teen-age girl wearing a baggy sweater.

The wood was full of men who were also stags and also the dogs that chased them.'' And so Rapunzel retreats ''The time I first bled I had a nightmare of the hunt. Girls have so few coming-of-age stories, so few Hucks and Galahads. I was dancing on points of clear glass.'' This woman sheathed my limbs in blue velvet. Do this, do that, you lazy heap of dirt.'' When an older woman who knew her mother arrives, Cinderella is transformed by her company: ''My old dusty self was spun new. Here Cinderella is in mourning for her dead mother and fills her days with self-punishing labor.

She'd rather be with her fairy godmother, but because what we took literally turns out to have been metaphor. In the first, Donoghue shows that she will turn the old tales inside out, not only because, after many dances with the prince, Cinderella will decide None of the women in these 13 stories are given names, but we recognize their familiar outlines right off. Was a strange story, one I would have to learn a new language to read, a language I could not learn except by trying to read the story.'' The final story in ''Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins.'' In the words of one of the heroines in this collection of reinterpreted fairy tales, Emma Donoghue tells us the task she has set herself: ''This Hen I was the age that you are now I was a girl like you, though not quite as stupid,'' says a cave-dwelling recluse with spiritual powers at the beginning of

Kissing the witch old tales in new skins