Reviews - Riverside Public Library

Booklist Reviews

Ever the wordsmith, Yolen dazzles with her first short story collection for adults in years. In these fairy-tale retellings, she cites popular tales as well as obscure myths, uniting them with strangeness and whimsy. Some entries are dark, some optimistic, but all delve into real-life sensations and emotions. In "Tough Alice," Alice defeats the Jabberwocky in the most unexpected, Wonderlandian of ways. Then, as an elderly woman in "Rabbit Hole," she takes a final, nostalgic trip through her favorite tunnel. "Beauty and the Beast" meets "The Gift of the Magi" with grisly results, and Dorothy never visits Oz. She does, however, return to Kansas as a gymnast, along with Toto, her stuffed dog on wheels. Yolen's lively, character-driven style immediately engages the imagination. Readers may even wonder if she, like Hans Christian Andersen in "Andersen's Witch," cut a deal with the Ice Maiden to deliver such enchanting results. Even though Yolen subverts the folklore that made the original stories famous in the first place, she stays true to why they matter and why we continue to revisit them. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.

ForeWord Magazine Reviews

For lovers of literature, Arthuriana, and fairy tales, this is a treasure trove.

The Emerald Circus is a moving collection of stories that conveys timeless truths as it affectionately plays with traditional tales.

Jane Yolen's latest collection is a wonderful menagerie of twists on classic fairy tales, legends, and the lives of literary figures. These stories parade beneath a circus tent knit by the underlying theme of the power of art.

Bookending the collection are two evocative yarns based on highly influential literary personalities. Hans Christian Anderson transcends his impoverished origins, encounters the real Snow Queen, and gains the admiration of children worldwide. Emily Dickinson is taken for a ride in an alien spaceship and discovers the connections that words can forge across differences. New reaches of beauty affect her poetry forever.

Between these stories, a vast range of legends and fairy tales are deftly reworked. Lancelot seeks the hidden grave of Guinevere. A group of Wendys stage a feminist revolt against Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. The tornado carries Dorothy away from Kansas to join the Emerald Circus, where she becomes a talented acrobat. The origin of Excalibur resides on a mysterious island of women swordsmiths. Alice, without a vorpal blade, faces the Jabberwocky. A dying monk relates the events surrounding the birth of Merlin. Every episode is delightfully fresh and full of poignant insight. For lovers of literature, Arthuriana, and fairy tales, this is a treasure trove.

The prose never fails to entrance, and the creativity on display impresses. There is an obvious depth of research and care, particularly evident in "The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown," a tale centering on Disraeli, the intriguing Jewish-turned-Anglican prime minister of Victoria's England on two separate occasions. Notes in the back on each individual story offer a peek into the mind of the writer and give context for Yolen's inspiration. These are interspersed with a few of her own poems, which are warm and inviting.

The Emerald Circus dances at the border between bucking tradition and paying homage to the great stories and figures of ages past. The result is a brilliant assemblage of narratives with the potential to leave an audience spellbound.

Kirkus Reviews

A collection of short stories, mostly reinventions of fairy tales, by Yolen (Jewish Fairy Tale Feasts, 2017, etc.), whose award-winning body of work stretches from sci-fi/fantasy to children's literature to poetry to cookbooks.Yolen's collection gathers together one new story along with 15 previously published pieces, including the Nebula-winning novella Lost Girls, a feminist deconstruction of Peter Pan in which a pragmatic modern girl winds up stuck as a Wendy. But Neverland isn't the only imaginary land visited: "Blown Away" explores the acrobatic Dorothy, who returns to Kansas, and the reader visits Wonderland in both "Tough Alice" and "Rabbit Hole," the latter a touching reflection on Alice's last trip. (There's also "Wonder Land," the coming-of-age story of Alison, whose sacred mysteries are grounded in the real world.) Arthurian England hosts four stories, with Evian Steel, another novella, showing the forging of crucial bits of Arthurian lore. The real world (or somet hing close to it) intrudes with the Nebula-winning "Sister Emily's Lightship," best described as "Emily Dickinson meets a Martian," and the quirkily charming "The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown," a musing on the unlikely, but perhaps magical, friendship between Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli. Homages to O. Henry, Poe, the brothers Grimm, and Keats are also present. The strongest offerings dig fresh ground rather than riffing too closely on their source material: "A Knot of Toads" stands out as a creepy look at one's own assumptions and judgments. Though only one of the stories is new, true fans will delight in Yolen's notes and poems that follow the collection. An impressive overview of the author's breadth and career, this collection will appeal to the author's existing devotees—or to anyone who has ever thought that "happily ever after" left too many questions. Copyright Kirkus 2017 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

Beauty sneaks out to get a Christmas gift for the Beast, the first of several wrong decisions in "The Gift of the Magicians, with Apologies to You Know Who." In "Blown Away," Dorothy's twister takes her away, not to a magical land but the Emerald Circus, and she returns home as a gymnastic performer who changes many lives. Wendy leads a labor strike against the Lost Boys in "Lost Girls." After more than a decade, Yolen (Briar Rose; Sister Emily's Starship and Other Stories) returns with 16 stories that take readers sideways and upside down through beloved fairy tales and classic tales such as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz, while also reimagining the lives of famous storytellers such as Hans Christian Anderson, Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. VERDICT These delightful retellings of favorite stories will captivate newcomers and fans of Yolen as she once again delivers the magic, humor, and lovely prose that has attracted readers for years.—KC

Publishers Weekly Reviews

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. Agent: Elizabeth Harding, Curtis Brown. (Nov.)

School Library Journal Reviews

Though only one of the 16 stories in Yolen's latest collection is newly published, the selections are anything but haphazard. The central vision of the compilation is the reimagining of folktales, legends, literature, and history. More than that, the volume feels unified by themes and imagery. The most obvious connections are three retellings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and three takes on the quasi-historical basis of the King Arthur myths. But even these seemingly discrete blocks of stories feed into the rest of the volume. One of the Arthur tales, for example, features the story of Merlin being told to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the real author of some of the earliest Arthurian legends. Yolen takes up this thread of focusing on the creative process again and again as she weaves stories of the magic behind Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. And of course, every entry contains Yolen's crystalline prose, which captures the magic in reality, and vice versa, with ease and grace. Each tale is accompanied by a brief note from Yolen and a related poem, almost all written newly for this work. VERDICT These highly entertaining retellings are perfect for teen fans of fairy tales and classic literature, though they are easily enjoyed without any background knowledge.—Mark Flowers, Springstowne Library, Vallejo, CA