The Emerald Circus
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
2018 World Fantasy Award winner
“The best book I’ve read in a long time.”
—Brandon Sanderson, author of Mistborn
Where is Wendy? Leading a labor strike against the Lost Boys, of course. In Jane Yolen’s first full collection in more than ten years discover new and uncollected tales of beloved characters, literary legends, and much more.
A Scottish academic unearths ancient evil in a fishing village. Edgar Allan Poe’s young bride is beguiled by a most unusual bird. Dorothy, lifted from Kansas, returns as a gymnastic sophisticate. Emily Dickinson dwells in possibility and sails away in a starship made of light. Alice’s wicked nemesis has jaws and claws but really needs a sense of humor.
Enter the Emerald Circus and be astonished by the transformations within.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This slight collection contains several very strong stories but is weakened by its overarching theme: all of the pieces are riffs on famous fairy tales, or on the lives of writers or famous historical personages, and there just isn't enough variation in the subject matter. So, for instance, Yolen provides five separate versions of Alice in Wonderland: one ("Wonder Land") is a vignette, two are poems, and the other two are decent stories but, in this context, feel somewhat redundant. The best pieces here, such as "Evian Steel," a genuinely subversive and affecting take on Arthurian legend, stand with the finest of Yolen's work, but these tales are readily available elsewhere: "Sister Emily's Lightship," a justly famous story of an encounter between Emily Dickinson and an alien, has already been the title piece in a separate Yolen collection. This book, therefore, is both full of gorgeous and masterly writing and entirely inessential. Yolen is a prolific and recognized writer who has written more than 350 books for teens and adults (this is her first adult book in several years) and won, among others, the Caldecott and Nebula Awards; her many fans will happily pick this up.
