On "The Emerald Circus": A Book Review

Title: The Emerald Circus
Author: Jane Yolen
Genre: Fiction, Short Story, Fantasy

About the book...
A collection of 16 of Jane Yolen's short stories with fairy tale, folklore, and fantasy based poetry themes, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Arthurian legends, encompassing stories first published in the 1980's up until present day. These stories also range in the age group they were written for with some being aimed at a younger audience and others at an adult audience.

What I think...
I want to like Yolen's stories, I really do, but despite how much I love her non-fiction book Touch Magic, enjoy watching/listening to videos of her talking about writing, and, in general, tend to agree with her views on writing and fairy tales, her fiction books (picture books excluded) just don't appeal to me as much in comparison to other writers.  Out of all the stories I only ended up liking "Andersen's Witch" and "A Knot of Toads". In the first one, Yolen takes the idea of Andersen struck a deal with the Snow Queen to be a famous writer, which I thought was a really cool idea (no pun intended). The other story, while slightly predicable in some ways had a nice build of suspense and made me think of M.R. James type stories (I don't have the book anymore, but she may have mentioned him as inspiration, though I read something else recently that made a comparison to him, so I could be wrong).

Given my feelings about her non-fiction works and her viewpoints on fairy tales and writing, it should come as no surprise that the other thing I really enjoyed about this book was that the end there was a "Story Notes and Poems" section that was very reminiscent of older fairy tale books, like those of Joseph Jacobs, that had a section that gave background for each of the tales included. While I didn't always care for the story, reading what inspired Yolen to write them and why she chose to go the direction she did with them, as well as finding out where they were originally published added an extra layer of depth to the stories.         

To sum it all up...
Not something that I would re-read, but if you're interested in re-tellings of classic tales or folklore it's worth at least looking into. ♥️