Kay's Bookshelf

Understandably enough I was fond of the way Frederik related to his secret: he had a small cardboard city hidden in the attic, with two residents made out of threadless wooden spools, with their heads being acorns. Frederik thinks they may feel lonely, and goes on to search for a way to get the pair a boat to go sailing, “to hunt for more family”. I found that to be a cute idea, and also the very reason why the path of Frederik and the little girl with the matches will intersect, albeit for a very short while.

This is another one of those stories where everyone is good and the atmosphere is relaxed. The queen was my favorite from this point of view, as she was quite a clumsy creature, always stepping on the hems of her dresses; a detail that could have made her ridiculous to the reader, but as she also treated everyone quite nicely, I ended up being amused by her in a good way.

A part of the product description of the book on Amazon.com (something I didn’t think about myself but is obvious once it’s been pointed out):

When it was first translated from Danish and published in England in the mid-nineteenth century, audiences likely interpreted the Little Match Girl′s dying visions of lights and a grandmother in heaven as metaphors of religious salvation. Maguire′s new piece, entitled “Matchless,” reilluminates Andersen′s classic, using his storytelling magic to rekindle Andersen′s original intentions, and to suggest transcendence, the permanence of spirit, and the continuity that links the living and the dead.

Another thing I have loved from the very first is the title. Which I find beautiful :)
I have no idea whether I am right or not, but I took it to be a play on words, as matchless means both with no matches (just like the little girl was after all her matches have burned) and without a match, alone, as two of the characters in the book happen to be. Also, at one point the girl’s mother’s eyes were mentioned to be matchless (as in unique), and I enjoyed having yet another meaning to play with. Isn’t it great that one single word title can be interpreted in so many ways? :)

Thoughts on the ending: It’s quite cute, made even more so by the pictures. How else :)

What I liked most: The fact that the author has managed to take such a gloomy story and turn it into a happy one without actually changing anything of importance…

What I liked least: …however, I was nevertheless a bit disappointed by the fact that the original story wasn’t changed; for some reason I was expecting otherwise. Didn’t bother me that much though as the whole was happy enough overall.

Recommend it to? Everyone. It a very short read (272 lines, according to one reviewer), and the pics (drawn by the author himself) are really nice :)

Written by the same author:
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Wicked

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What I liked most about the characters in the book was their multidimensionality: they felt real, they had (at times contradictory) feelings and they didn’t fit any typology of good and bad. My favorite character was (of course) Iris: she’s a good girl albeit, loving her two sisters and helping them as best as she can, although she cannot help feeling jealousy when the boys she likes seem smitten with Clara’s beauty. Iris has an inferiority complex when it comes to looks, because she is quite plain looking, her mother not hesitating to call her ugly now and then — and yet, perhaps paradoxically, perhaps because of an unconscious inner yearn for what she doesn’t possess, Iris is the one who has “an eye” for beauty, seeing it wherever she looks, in the way the colors are arranged or in the way light falls on surfaces. Clara on the other hand is almost the very opposite: while not a bad child she is strange (“willful and timid at once“), sucking her thumb long after infancy and afraid of the world outside her home (perhaps with a good reason to, as she was kidnapped when she was three). Unfortunately she lacks the solicitude Iris has, placing her own interests above all else.

Even Maragarethe, “the wicked stepmother”, is not as wicked as one would have expected. While not necessarily a good person, she loves her daughters and would make anything to help them have good lives. From that point of view I couldn’t help relating her to Scarlett O’Hara: the way both Scarlett and Margarethe have had to starve and see their loved ones starve with them; the way both of them have then tried to go any lengths in order for that not to happen again, including marrying men they did not love; and also in the way both Scarlett and Margarethe shared a complete lack of taste when they at last married into money. These similitudes made me perhaps like Margarethe a bit more than I would have liked her otherwise, because they helped me detach her image from the expected “wicked stepmother” one and understand her situation better.

I was very pleasantly surprised on reading this book. When I read Wicked I almost hated it for all the cruelty it contained (towards the Animals, towards Elphaba herself) and, although I liked the writing, I didn’t expect to pick up another book of this author anytime soon. And yet the premise of this book sounded interesting and, hoping no cruelty will be involved, I picked it up. And I am very glad I did, because, while it also provokes strong feelings (luckily nothing as painfully unjust as some situations in Wicked were), it adds a lot of depth to a story we all have heard times and times before.

It is perhaps amusing how the author, while keeping the main elements, the ones that make the story easily identifiable (a mother with two daughters marries a man with one daughter of his own; the man’s daughter is nicknamed Cinderella; there is a ball and a prince and a beautiful unknown girl who steals the prince’s heart; a slipper that would later on help the prince identify the girl), changed almost anything else. The three girls love each other like sisters; no one forced Cinderella to live in the kitchen, it was her very own choice; for that matter, Clara/Cinderella does not have a heart of gold nor are her stepsisters evil; the pumpkin carriage is merely an invention; and so on.

My favorite lines were the very last lines in the book (which I can safely put here as they don’t actually have any connection whatsoever to the rest):

But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children’s faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; and they blur to keep us from loving them too deeply, for their protection, and also for ours.

What I liked most: The very idea of taking a well known story such as Cinderella and twist it in order to enable us to see the points of view of the other people involved in the story. Oh, and also the fact that the story was placed in a real world setting (Holland no less :) ).

What I liked least: show spoiler

Recommend it to? Everyone, hee hee. I really liked it you know :)

Written by the same author:
Matchless
Wicked

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Popularity: 7% [?]

I could not help feeling sorry for poor Elphaba all throughout the book. First of all she is not wicked — she is a bit aloof and insecure because people always were suspicious of her green skin, but that’s it. She is very interested in the fate of those who cannot defend themselves (the Animals) and she is an animal lover too (offering shelter to any helpless or homeless animal she happened to pass by). Nevertheless she ends up being nicknamed The Wicked Witch of the West (luckily she doesn’t care about it enough to be actually bothered:

“People always did like to talk, didn’t they? That’s why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”

). Unfortunately all her trials and tribulations begin to leave their mark on her, and, as time passes, she does become a bit… unhinged — but I still couldnt help seeing her as a victim and being sorry for her. Come to think about it, there is no character I have actually and truly liked: Galinda/Glinda was too flighty, Nessarose was really annoying with all her talk of religion, etc. Fiyero started out to be quite a nice character but unfortunately he left the pages of the book before long. As for the Wizard, he is malevolent to say the least, happily to mold the land he’s ruling into any shape he pleases, without caring a bit about right or wrong (a huge contrast to what I’ve thought of him after the Wizard of Oz).

Actually, the whole world of Oz turns out to be completely different from the world one reading The Wizard of Oz (or seeing the movie) might expect. The outlook is gloomy, not only for the Quadlings (poor people living in a land filled with underground rubies, ending up exterminated because of that) or Animals, but for the rest of people too: the nature is sometimes against them (droughts, winds), plus it never is easy to live under what looks suspiciously like a dictatorship. Nevertheless, it is the book’s merit that is has taken a world seen only as a prop, as a place for things to happen in, and has turned it into a “real” one, with problems and celebrations, people and animals. For example it was kinda interesting to study the people’s beliefs: we deal with a melange of religions, Lurlinism — belief in the Goddess Lurline (with the associated feast, Lurlinemas), Unionism — belief in the Unnamed God and the pleasure faith — the one putting sorcery and witchcraft above all else.

It is fascinating to see how the same thing can have different meanings depending on whose eyes we look through:
POSSIBLE SPOILER
In the Wizard of Oz we see the Witch sending wolves, bees and crows in Dorothy’s path to stop her advance and her friend’s. The Witch being bad, we actually rejoice when the beasts are defeated and killed so the four friends can move on.
In this book, Elphaba sends her beloved dog Killyjoy (along with others he gathered along the way) to aid the travelers and bring them to her. As such, I was completely heartbroken when the Tin Man, misunderstanding the message, killed Killyjoy and the rest. Elphaba then sends crows and bees, with more or less friendly intentions too: they meet the same fate, and the reader cannot help feeling sorry for Elphaba’s loss (especially at a moment where those animals were almost all the friends she had).
Elphaba’s quite aggressive behavior towards Dorothy is thus explained:

“You have no right to those shoes,” said the Witch. She circled. The girl backed away, stumbling over furniture, knocking over the beehive, and stepping on the queen bee, who had emerged from the fragments.
“Everything I have, every little thing I have, dies when you come across it,” said the Witch. “There’s Liir down below, ready to throw me over for the sake of a single kiss. My beasts are dead, my sister is dead, you strew death in your path, and you’re just a girl! You remind me of Nor! She thought the world was magic, and look what happened to her!”

Same outcome, two very different feelings from the part of the reader. A prompt to always try to see both sides of the story (and very well written I might add).
END SPOILER

Another thing I have found quite interesting was everything related to the Grimmerie book: the very idea that a book written in our world could not be read in Oz, the letters scrambling and moving as if made out of ants. I wonder whether all books would have behaved that way or only the Grimmerie, being a magic book and all (either way, as we have no books with moving letters its behavior probably was the effect being in Oz had on the book). Also interesting is the fact that Elphaba could partially read it (SPOILER The most certain proof that the story about her being the daughter of the wizard was true END SPOILER).

And a short quote relating to the difference between sorcery and science in the alnd of Oz:

“Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old.”

What I liked most: All the prodding and poking regarding the source of Animals and how they relate to people and/or animals. While I have had my share of fantasy worlds where everything could exist (including sentient animals) I’ve never seen anyone asking where some of the creatures came from :P
Also, all the debating on what is evil and where it came from was interesting too.

What I liked least: There were some passages that have struck me as really cruel. I’ll never be able to think about the Wizard of Oz in the same terms ever again (without remembering, at the very least, the poor battered Red Bear cub). There were some very sad moments and I have found myself repeatedly wishing I have never begun this book (I don’t remember ever feeling the same way before). I do know I should be impressed (and am) for the fact that a book can make me feel so strongly, but really, it’s not a very enjoyable feeling (which is why it ended up mentioned here, under the heading “what I liked least”)

Recommend it? Regardless on my thoughts on the book I do recommend it, for the very same reason I started reading it myself: I know a lot of people who consider this their favorite book,so I imagine that, even though it didn’t sit very well with me, it’s probably a great book (or at least a must try).

Written by the same author:
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
Matchless

Amazon Affiliate. If you click an Amazon link and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.

Popularity: 26% [?]