This is the story about a girl who is sent by her step mother to the evil witch in the woods to borrow a light. It starts off like the Cinderella story with the father remarrying a woman with two daughters and then dying, leaving his daughter to be mistreated by the stepmother and stepsisters. The stepmother is jealous of the girl's beauty and sweet disposition in comparison with her own daughters so she sends the girl out into the woods to seek out the evil Baba Yaga to ask for a light. the thing about the witch is that very few people who meet her live to tell about it. The witch eats people and has a house built out of their bones. So the girl goes obediently to the witch and she takes with her a doll her mother made her before she died, and the doll is magical, because it was made with her mother's love. So when she gets to the witch and asks for a light the witch agrees to give her a light if she can complete the tasks set before her, which are to cook huge meals and clean everything. The Baba Yaga leaves and the girl frets over what to do and then her doll comes alive and does most of the chores for her. The witch is satisfied and gives the girl one of her lights which when she presents to her stepmother, burns the stepmother alive. At this point, though she wasn't the strongest heroine ever, I'm hopeful for a strong ending, thinking maybe she won't need to get married at the end of the book to justify the plot... but she does, and it's not a bad thing, I'm just getting a bit bored with the same ending over and over (in both adult and children's stories).
This story had more of a classical fairy tale feel to it. It had a dark atmosphere to it with the beautiful illustrations, which at some points I could see very small children being afraid, of the Baba Yaga for example, but for the most part I felt they kept the story pretty clean. It could have definitely been very much more graphic, which I would have loved, but this is a children's book. What I enjoyed about this book was that things had to be a certain way, things HAD to get done, like in older stories. Even though the stepmother treats her very poorly, the girl still obeys her and minds her, and from a feminist perspective this can be seen in a very bad light. A submissive girl with no back bone and no will of her own, an abusive relationship in essence. But, if you look at it as something produced a time long ago, when morals were different, and from a fairy tale perspective, where (if you know your mythology) everything has rules, very strict rules that must be followed, as the sequence is almost as important, if not more so, than the final product, it's more fanciful and exciting and much more archetypal, like the an old fairy tale. In most of today's stories we tell kids that nothing binds them and they can do whatever they want, and while it is good to leave an abusive relationship and all kids must learn that this is a good thing, people will always be bound by something, something that stays their hand or forces action, maybe sometimes against their will, and a lot of children today (myself included) don't really grasp this concept because all our lives we've been fed the fairy tale that we control our own destiny and what i say goes.. but that's not always the reality. Lessons like this can be learned from fairy tales of this nature.
Craft's illustrations are absolutely gorgeous and I wish there were more of them in this book. The subject matter had the potential to be scary, so I think the scenes depicted were selected carefully and on some pages only a small picture was provided in the corner... but this illustrator is so good that anything she does is magnificent. I wish the whole book was full pages of her illustrations. The prose was good as well though. It had a decent flow and was over all pretty well done.
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