Fairy tale romance

[sawyl]

I admit it: I'm fickle and inconstant in my affections. Cherubino-like, all a book has to do is look at me coquettishly and suddenly I'm overcome by a desire to read it, even if I don't really have the time to spare. The latest treatise to thusly trap my poor battered heart is Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales, a particularly gorgeous reprint of her original two volume set for Virago.

I guess it could have been worse: the individual tales are pretty short — some are less than a page long — so there's at least a chance that I might be able to find some time to read some of them, the woodcut illustrations and capitals are suitably folksy, and there's an afterword by Marina Warner. Plus, the rule of trumps says any set of fairy tales compiled by Angela Carter beats anything by Charles Perrault or the Grimm Brothers hands down.