Not what you expected;: A collection of short stories

By Joan Aiken

Book Overview

A brilliant collection of some of Joan Aiken's best stories. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385085168
• ISBN13: 9780385085168
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

The most beautiful short stories ever written

In a memorable scene of C.S. Lewis's _The Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ the heroine, Lucy, sneeks into a magician's home in search of a spell, and finds in his spellbook stories more magical and wonderous than any she had ever read. I am convinced that this is that book, save that no enchantment prevents you, unlike Lucy, from turning back to the beginning and reading them all again.Of the thousands upon thousands of stories and books I have read in the fantasy, speculative and magic-realism genres, this collection stands out. They are quite simply the most exquisitely beautiful stories I know. These are fairy tales -- marchen, really -- but wholly modern ones, in the best possible way. Firmly in the genre of fantasy, she often employs fantastical elements in ways more typical of magic-realism, to illustrate psychological truths; the result is incomparably lovely and satisfying. She writes with the mythical atmosphere of Neil Gaiman, but where Gaiman's stories often seem all hollow atmosphere and no purpose, her works often have interesting things to say or points to explore that give her stories both solidity and bite. She plays with turning traditional tropes upside-down (such as making darkness the object of a princess' quest) and reinvestigating old stories (such as The Three Wishes) for new lessons, as well as inventing new themes, images, ideas of such archetypical resonance, it is as if they have always been there. The language she employs has superb and lucid lyricism, and her authorial voice changes subtlely to suit each story she tells, masterfully. Her tales are all easy to enjoy, but some of them are quite challenging to understand, and bear thought for days, even years later, yielding successively deeper layers of meaning to contemplation. She does not shy away from tragedy, nor from delight; these stories range from the humble to the expansive, but all of them moving, and tremendously haunting. It is incomprehensible to me that this book is out of print.

My favorite collection of short stories ever

This book of short stories really appeals to some part of me that almost nobody satisfies but Joan Aiken, and these are some of her best stories. I've seen them described as "quirky"; in them, things happen that never could happen, yet they make perfect sense in the story--a child wanders into an unused room and finds a tree growing there, with some of his ancestors sitting on the branches, and makes friends with one of them; a ballerina who breaks her leg slipping on a banana peel curses the entire town (but just see how the curse is broken!); a lonely child who plays at talking to King Canute in a telephone booth receives a call from him to warn her of approaching danger. I've just ordered a copy of this book for myself, after checking it out from the library for years; I recommend it to anyone, adult or child, with a taste for intelligent fiction that is, truly, _Not What You Expected_.