Outfoxing Fear

Ragan's second anthology of folktales (ed., Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters, 1998) contains 64 brief narratives that, judging by the personal essays introducing each section, she hopes will exemplify ingenuity and courage. Unfortunately, her uneven selection makes folktales seem all too often violent, unclear or inconclusive. This is not a terrible book, but less than it could have been, given the fleeting glimpses we have of its editor's best nature. A handful of these tales are satisfyingly pointed and ingenious. In "The Ghost of Farnell," a young woman learns she has been safely escorted across a dark moorland by the very specter she feared. The clever heroine of "The Lady and the Unjust Judge" shrewdly reads human nature to help a poor man win justice. Many, however, are just plain lame, or seem totally unrelated to the topics Ragan establishes. The brief, drab "Canadian-Icelandic" story, "Girl Learns to Write by Practicing on Frozen Pond," which appears under the chapter heading "Desperate Courage," is simply an account of a child's tracing her father's name in the snow covering a frozen pond. There is no particular element of courage or even surprise, since the title gives the game away. Although this is billed as a volume for all ages, parents of young children will find "Still Another Spook" crudely violent, to little purpose: Within just two pages, the Spook in question is burnt, scalded, shot, chopped into pieces with a machete and impaled on a sharpened stake that "went up his ass and came out his mouth." And although there are footnotes to explain foreign terms deemed untranslatable, including many that have passed into common English, such as "keening" and "vizier," many odd words go unexplained. When a lass sleeps on the "hurdle" of a house, it's hard to guess where she is, and "Long ago the Lincolnshire Cars were full of bogs" holds a meaning of "cars" mysterious to most. A disappointing collection. (Kirkus Reviews)