Man, I wish I could just be wandering about and a wood sprite would give me golden thread and then I owned a castle and also a magic sword that could chop the heads off any of my enemies. Plus a frog that talked and some rubies. And be able to fly. Or change into a donkey. Really, anything from The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, except being one of the ones ones getting my head cut off and or drowned in a barrel. Fairy tales are weird. The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales publishes a whole stack of them that were collected by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth from Eastern Bavaria in the 1850s. A puppeteer (amongst other things) found them in the files of a municipal archives in 2009. That alone seems like it could be made into a fairy tale, or at least a National Treasure. The movie could have really cartoony Nazis, like in that Indiana Jones movie I never saw (which would be all of them), and then the magic from the stories could come to life, and maybe Gorbachev could be there, and I’m focusing more on this because I don’t really have much to say about this book. They are traditional, oral, German, fairy tales. People get tricked and turned into animals and then curses are lifted and things happen for really no reason whatsoever. Characters act sort of like random particles, bumping into each other, and causing odd chaotic effects to ripple through. And no one has any real internal psychological thought; people just live and do. They don’t think.
In the car this summer, we listened to The Collected Works of The Brothers Grimm; The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales was a nice comparison piece to go along with that. You could see the tropes that linked these stories to those. It’s definitely not Disney-fied stuff, but it isn’t R-rated either. Kind of a fun diversion from the regular stream of depressing, internal-monologue, novels I read.
The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth went on sale February 24, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.