132,813
edits
Changes
Book Reviews From The Bookbag (view source)
Revision as of 13:14, 23 October 2015
, 13:14, 23 October 2015no edit summary
'''Read [[:Category:Features|the latest features]].'''<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Marina Warner
|title=Fly Away Home
|rating=3
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=How would you subvert a fairy tale? You know enough of them and enough about them to do it, so think on it. Would you give a mermaid a smartphone? Would you pepper them with pop stars, and perhaps let them be witness to the Schadenfreude caused by a cave that's sacred to native Canadians? Would you, in the light of their characters usually being routine, interchangeable tropes, give them a closely-observed personality – as seen here in a teacher's interior thoughts when faced with a piece of East Anglian lore? Would you take the exoticism of the east, and Egypt in particular, and see it in the light of a musical teacher on a zero-hours contract who ends up muttering to himself, directing traffic in the middle of the road, or from the remove of an elderly man with ''swollen feet in orthopaedic sandals'' with a message from the past? Certainly these two are not the standard Arabian Nights-styled pieces…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784630381</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephanie Blake
|summary=This is the inaugural volume of a new series of Shakespeare retellings from Hogarth Press. Still to come: Margaret Atwood on ''The Tempest'', Howard Jacobson on ''The Merchant of Venice'' and Anne Tyler on ''The Taming of the Shrew'', among others. How is this first book? It's pretty good as Winterson novels go, incorporating Shakespearean themes of time, deception and adoption and turning bears and statues into metaphors while remaining loyal to the essence of the plot. Yet two crucial elements of the play don't make sense in a modern setting, and in the end I felt this added nothing to my enjoyment of the original.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781090297</amazonuk>
}}