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A review by scribal
Gossip from the Forest by Sara Maitland
4.0
Second review after mulling it over for a week or more: I've started a project that will include a lot of thinking about woods and nature, tales and the spirits of place. I read Maitlands book hoping/expecting to find "my" haunted forest. Never in my bookwormy, nerdy, long life has a book about a subject dear to me made me feel so American!! This was not my experience of woods at all! And these were not the tales and fairies that lived in "my" woods.
Maitland says "we" worry about other people not wild animals in the forest. Yes, near cities, but in the Rocky Mountain pine and spruce forests I do worry about mountain lions and bears, and lightening, and flash floods. She says it's the Grimm stories that "we" relate to. I always found them flat and affectless. "My" fairy tales were hidden in the illustrations by Arthur Rackham or Fritz Wegner; hinted at in epic poetry and in the margins of mythologies.
As I said below the historical practices of forestry in Britain were fascinating to me. I was raised by a forester/tree scientist/woodcarver who took me on my first forest walks in frozen flooded pine plantations when I was very young, and I appreciated Maitland's easy explanations of older practices in the contexts of her forest walks. (Interestingly I've read many reviews of the book and this part is the only part that ever gets any criticism. I thought it had the most specific "placeness" of anything in the book).
First Review:
This book seeks to connect fairytales and forests in a deep, imaginative, childlike way which is a wonderful concept. The description of forest practices as currently observable in British forests and the fairytale retellings are very good.
I found the author's personal responses of fairytales and forests to be that: personal. They weren't often ones I shared and were hardly compelling as evidence for a theory. Related to that is the very odd choice to address only the Grimm collection of tales..rejecting Celtic mythology offhandedly because it is "of the sea," for example.
I enjoyed reading it.
Maitland says "we" worry about other people not wild animals in the forest. Yes, near cities, but in the Rocky Mountain pine and spruce forests I do worry about mountain lions and bears, and lightening, and flash floods. She says it's the Grimm stories that "we" relate to. I always found them flat and affectless. "My" fairy tales were hidden in the illustrations by Arthur Rackham or Fritz Wegner; hinted at in epic poetry and in the margins of mythologies.
As I said below the historical practices of forestry in Britain were fascinating to me. I was raised by a forester/tree scientist/woodcarver who took me on my first forest walks in frozen flooded pine plantations when I was very young, and I appreciated Maitland's easy explanations of older practices in the contexts of her forest walks. (Interestingly I've read many reviews of the book and this part is the only part that ever gets any criticism. I thought it had the most specific "placeness" of anything in the book).
First Review:
This book seeks to connect fairytales and forests in a deep, imaginative, childlike way which is a wonderful concept. The description of forest practices as currently observable in British forests and the fairytale retellings are very good.
I found the author's personal responses of fairytales and forests to be that: personal. They weren't often ones I shared and were hardly compelling as evidence for a theory. Related to that is the very odd choice to address only the Grimm collection of tales..rejecting Celtic mythology offhandedly because it is "of the sea," for example.
I enjoyed reading it.