A review by emily_m_green
Happily: A Personal History-With Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Thank you to Random House Book Club and Goodreads Giveaways for the review copy of Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales by Sabrina Oren Mark, which I received in exchange for a fair and honest review.
In Happily, Mark uses fairytales to discuss personal experiences and public concerns. She considers characters and retellings, gender roles, and the lessons the stories are meant to teach.
While Mark uses fairytales to discuss many different topics, the subject she returns to the most often is family. Her mother enters as a voice on the telephone, her children have the wisdom of youth, her husband as the intonation of support and affection. However, Mark also discusses her struggles as a third wife and stepmother. Knowing that your beloved has had lives before you is always a haint in the background, but ex partners and children make for much noisier ghosts, especially when their history is more complicated than your own.
Happily, for all the difficult and weighty topics it discusses, is not overly heavy, in part because the book chapters are so short. Each chapter is an essay that’s scarcely a breath.
The essays make use of a lot of tactics that poetry uses: allusions, layering of stories, repetition, and bringing together of disparate pieces. Her essays are beautiful collages.
Would I teach Happily? Yes. The essays are excellent instruction of what essays can do and how they can disrupt a typical narrative structure.
In Happily, Mark uses fairytales to discuss personal experiences and public concerns. She considers characters and retellings, gender roles, and the lessons the stories are meant to teach.
While Mark uses fairytales to discuss many different topics, the subject she returns to the most often is family. Her mother enters as a voice on the telephone, her children have the wisdom of youth, her husband as the intonation of support and affection. However, Mark also discusses her struggles as a third wife and stepmother. Knowing that your beloved has had lives before you is always a haint in the background, but ex partners and children make for much noisier ghosts, especially when their history is more complicated than your own.
Happily, for all the difficult and weighty topics it discusses, is not overly heavy, in part because the book chapters are so short. Each chapter is an essay that’s scarcely a breath.
The essays make use of a lot of tactics that poetry uses: allusions, layering of stories, repetition, and bringing together of disparate pieces. Her essays are beautiful collages.
Would I teach Happily? Yes. The essays are excellent instruction of what essays can do and how they can disrupt a typical narrative structure.