For many of us, myself included faerie tales are the first stories we hear told by loving parents and grandparents at bedtime or in my case at lunch in exchange for practicing my ABC's, much to my grammy's horror my penmanship never got much better than it was at five. For me especially faerie tales are things I always come back to you. If you follow my Goodreads a good portion of the books I read are re-tellings of these tales. I hunt them down and read every one of them no matter how awful the reviews are and to be honest I don't believe I have come across one yet that is actually awful. So when an I guess "scholarly" look at the people who brought us these tales popped up as a suggestion on Netgalley, I jumped at the chance to read it. And then I became a little worried. A scholarly look at anything unfortunately has a tendency to be dry. So I sat on it. I loaded it on my Kindle several times only to close it out and grab a different book, afraid that this book would take the heart out of the tales I have loved my whole life. I am happy to announce that Jubber crafted his own magical tale while bringing these storytellers that many of us have probably never even heard of to life.
Jubber looks at seven individual storytellers who either collected tales or invented their own. People that in many cases have been lost to history, being overshadowed by the people we credit for these tales today. Such as the original author of Beauty and the Beast, or Wilheim Grimm's wife who told the brothers the bulk of their stories. His look at Hans Christian Andersen was possibly my favorite though, especially since many of his stories have been blasted over the last several years. When his life story is brought into the mix the tales (especially The Little Mermaid) take on a new and heartbreaking dimension.
What truly makes this amazing though is Jubber's ability to conjure a time and place and the people living in that time and place. I have never seen an image of many of the people in this book and yet I have an image in my head that after a brief google search of the ones I could find matches his descriptions. His descriptions of places like Kashmir in the 10th century Ad (it could have been the 11th doing this from memory) are on par with (and in many cases better than) any fiction or travel writer. His words evoked real emotion and I'm not going to lie I teared up a bit at the epilogue because he had lovingly taken me through time by telling the lives of these amazing people who shaped much of my worldview as a child.
I honestly cannot recommend this book enough to anyone who is a lover of stories.
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