Emotion runs as a vein through most of the stories in this collection, but I was particularly struck by "Feeding" and "Origami". The characters in these stories are heavily affected by loss: Of a child, of missing a partner who cannot be nearby. This loss is manifested in different ways, each poignant and heartbreaking.
In "Feeding", Shelly and Peter leave their modern, coastal Australian life and move to the arid, sparse Outback. The nearest town is 200km away. They find the adjustment very difficult, especially struggling to grow anything - food, flower, family. There is very little rain, which makes the land infertile. I found the infertility of the land to be a metaphor for Shelly's own infertility. I inferred that Shelly and Peter were once going to be parents, but a tragic event (miscarriage/stillbirth) took their child from them. They were so distraught that they retreated from their lives. Shelly suffers physically, psychologically, and emotionally from the tragedy. She spends all day, and most of the night, obsessively planting and tending to seeds, but without success. Peter tries to be supportive, loving, and understanding. He repeatedly paints a spare bedroom, which the couple refer to as "everything except the nursery". The color of paint is a pale yellow, and Peter remarks that the color would "work for a boy or a girl". When rains finally come, and Shelly's garden blooms in vibrancy, it's as though Shelly has herself bloomed back into life from out of her depression.
A different kind of loss is felt in "Origami". Rebecca misses her partner, Sean, who works out at sea on an oil rig. Because of the distance, he often works away for weeks at a time. He calls weekly, but is only able to talk briefly each time. To help assuage her loneliness, Rebecca takes to collecting paper ephemera and folding them to make a life-sized model of a human. A train ticket becomes a tongue, a newspaper is folded to make intestines. The intensity and focus of the paper folding project keeps her mind occupied so that she isn't completely overwhelmed by her longing for her partner.
Diversity isn't something that makes much of an appearance in fairy tales, especially in the sterilized, Disney universe. Therefore, it was refreshing to read stories about so many diverse, complicated characters. In "Una and Coll Are Not Friends", two schoolchildren forge a bond over their magical realist deformities. Una has antlers growing from her head, and Coll has an animal tail. They are each considered to be distracting by students and teachers, and are regularly removed from the classrooms. The beautiful thing about Una and Coll is that, despite their unusual features, they are fully realized humans. Their antlers/tail are a part of them, but to them do not define who they are. In giving the characters these traits, the author is commenting on society's treatment of those who don't conform to the physical norms of society.
In "Witch", Emmy and the female narrator are teenage lovers who enjoy drinking alcohol and challenging each other to adventures. Emmy dares the narrator to enter the woods, where the witch Baba Yaga is fabled to live. At first she wanders around confidently, then gets disoriented. While trying to find her way back, she first has an awkward encounter with another couple in the woods, then stumbles upon the cabin of Baba Yaga, a 1970's "concrete hut, long abandoned, covered in 'Danger of Death' signs". Instead of being the mythological witch from the fairy tales, the narrator discovers that Baba Yaga is a bookish hippy who was evicted from her apartment, was left by her girlfriend, and found the cabin after a self-destructive episode of drinking in the forest. She prefers the isolation of the woods, and chooses it over modern life.
There are 20 tales in this collection, and there was only one that I didn't love. "Momma Grows a Diamond" is the story of the daughter of a brothel madame in New Orleans in the early twentieth century. We get glimpses of the daughter as she grows and matures from age 10 to 13, and eventually joins in the family business. I really enjoyed the story, except for one detail - the city. The only ways that the reader knows it's set in New Orleans are the mentions of beignets and a single reference to Lake Ponchatrain. I felt let down that there weren't descriptions of the sultry heat, the Mississippi River, the romantically decaying architecture, and the other vital aspects of that beautiful and atmospheric city. I know that it's a small matter, and it doesn't affect the plot of the story, but I just couldn't help noticing. If you removed the few New Orleans references, this story could really have taken place anywhere.
Overall, I was vastly impressed with The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. The author creates or reimagines stories that confront our humanity and encourage us to look at our world in new ways. She uses emotion and diversity to great effect, and may have created a new collection of tales to share with generations to come.
Librorum annis
