Aimee Bender Reviews Marina Warner’s ONCE UPON A TIME

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/books/…

This is the challenge and excitement of writing anything comprehensive about such stories: More than any other genre, fairy tales travel and transform — they are rewritten, remade, recollected and retold. Warner has been studying them for decades, across continents and millenniums, and she tracks their evolution with relish.

The chapters are well organized, covering historical documentation, feminism, psychoanalysis, the impact of illustration, film, and more, though at times the subheadings feel arbitrary or narrow, unable to contain the roaming feel of Warner’s prose. A writer who describes how stories “migrate on soft feet, for borders are invisible to them, no matter how ferociously they are policed by cultural purists” has some of that same quality herself, and besides the wealth of information here, the strongest readerly pleasures are her associations with and riffs on the many, many things fairy tales touch.

A good day for fairy tales!