octavia_cade 's review for:

The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde

3.0

emotional sad fast-paced

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A short collection of five fairy stories by Oscar Wilde. Three of them, admittedly, are rather mawkish, and I say that even though I really do like "The Happy Prince" very much indeed. That sickly sentimentality tips rather too far in "The Nightingale and the Rose," however, and Wilde's simpering sense of sacrifice, sacrifice beyond all sense, pops up again in "The Devoted Friend." I think I am supposed to feel sorry for poor downtrodden Hans, but I don't. The Miller is a terrible person, a user of the first degree, but when someone is so desperate to be a doormat, well, I won't say that they invite people to tread on them, because that is awful, but Hans might as well have written Kick Me! all over himself in indelible ink. I can't help but think that the Miller, as with the titular protagonist of "The Remarkable Rocket," represent some of the strongest characterisation here, even if they are satire. Everyone else is just so unrelentingly saintly, especially the poor doomed birds. Wilde does love his doomed little birds.