Steffani Raff, The Ravenous Gown and 14 More Tales about Real Beauty. Exisle Publishing, 1 September 2015 184pp., $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781939624593
It is always intriguing to see the choices writers make when they work with different aspects of traditional storytelling to create new versions. Speffani Raff’s collection of ‘tales about real beauty‘, The Ravenous Gown and 14 More Tales’, is an interesting example of this process at work. The language and structure of her writing is beautiful and in many ways captures these aspects of the literary fairytale. The stories are quirky, humorous and entertaining, however I would suggest that in content the message sometimes seems to dominate the tale, making them in places a tad didactic. In capturing a genre, I would see the tales as being closer to fables about the shallow nature of many aspects modern life rather than fairy tales. They almost seem to cry out to have the moral quoted specifically at the end of each tale.
Having said this, it can also be argued that the writing is an innovation of mixing traditional genres, which it does very effectively. So although these comments might be playing around the edges of what readers really want to know about a book, it is also interesting to contemplate its role as a children’s text, and how it fits with the concepts of traditional tales. It has a lot of potential for classroom use and I have no doubt that young readers would enjoy it. It is a little difficult to allocate suitability ages for this text as it would depend on how and why readers selected it. That said for general readers I would suggest 10-14 years but would also add there’s a much wider readership that would engage with it for many different reasons.
Reviewed by Sue Clancy
