Summary: A retelling of some of the Jack and the Beanstalk stories.
I have made my love of KB Hoyle’s writing well known. I have read every book she has written, most more than once. I have never met her in person, but we are both in the facebook group for Christ and Pop Culture magazine where she is a regular writer and we have interacted a lot over the years. Hopefully we will meet someday.
Part of what I love about her books is that they are literary and still written for middle grade or young adult readers. By literary, I don’t mean esoteric or abstract or hard to understand, but I mean that there is depth that invites rereading. There is always a surface story that moves the story along and engages the reader. But there is also always depth to the story in allusions and references and underlying themes that may not be apparent to a young adult reader on the first reading.
One of the things that drives my kids crazy (but I think it is still important) is that I frequently will stop a movie or pause in reading and ask about a scene and what is going on. Sometimes they have understood the reference or know what the word means, but a lot of the time they haven’t. Part of what I am trying to do is invite them to look for the meaning below the surface.
I have been hosting a zoom book club since 2020. Right now we are reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It is a compilation of four biographical essays. Baldwin is a master of references and allusions. Some are easier to spot than others, but it is clear that he isn’t only a writer, but a deep reader, of scripture, the classics and the current literature of his time. It is a joy to read that in a group because we have different histories and experiences and we catch different things.
One of the challenges of a pluralistic society is that we do not always share the same literary and cultural history. But good writing is still good writing on the surface. It communicates a top level meaning. The story moves along and engages. Or the essay communicates meaning. Baldwin is talking about his awakening to his body and sexuality and at the same time, his grappling with the reality of racism and the isolation of growing up in Harlem (in part because of his exposure to the world outside of Harlem) when he starts a line with, “For the wages of sin were visible everywhere….” The rest of that phrase from Romans brings context to the passage.
The verse from Romans 6:23 is, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The context of the longer passage is that Paul is talking about the relationship between sin and grace and the role of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection in overcoming the influences of sin. The paragraph that follows Baldwin’s opening line discusses the tragedy of a ghetto, but also before he ends the paragraph he invokes White Christian racism that does not follow through on the Christian love that Christ call us to in “love one another as I have loved you” and “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Without knowing the multiple biblical allusions in that paragraph, you can still read it and know that Baldwin is describing the problems of poverty and isolation and the temptation to crime as a means of escape from poverty (or just to survive.) But with the additional layers of the biblical allusions of the passage, there are layers to Baldwin’s words that cut deeper than a simple description of growing up in Harlem. That is wide afield of a fairytale retelling of various Jack and the Beanstalk tales, but I think it is worth emphasizing that the depth to the story is what makes the story great.
In each book of Hoyle’s fairytale series, a minor character from a previous book becomes the main protagonist in the new book and a new tale is told. In The Son of Gold and Sorrow, James has to complete three impossible tasks before he can break the curse on the woman he loves. One of those tasks is to kill a giant who is terrorizing a village in the kingdom where he is. When James comes to the village, he is unprepared for the size of the giant and the terror of the people. The giant has been taking young women and eating them for years. The people have started naming their daughters with male names and dressing them in male clothes to hide them from the giant. So when James meets a young woman who has been preparing a spear that will be long enough and strong enough and sharp enough to kill the giant, it not surprising that the name of that girl is Jack.
Jack gives James the spear and it is a mixture of James, the people of the community who are stirred to action by Jack, the animals of the area who come to help for another reason I won’t get into, that end up killing the giant. But the tragedy that runs throughout the Daughter of Rage and Ruin is that while the giant is dead, Jack’s older sister had been killed the night before. The giant is dead, but Jack’s purpose in making the spear was to save her sister. Jack saves James’ life as James kills the giant, but Jack is unable to save her sister’s life.
And that sets up the story told here. As with all of this series, there is a chaste romance and lots of action. But that underlying theme of grappling with grief and the trauma of feeling like you could have prevented tragedy is present. There are also sub-themes of the role of class and station in life as is common in royal romance books and grappling with feelings of inadequacy (while others view the person with wonder) that is also a very common theme of young adult books.
As with the rest of the series, I do not think you need to know the underlying fairytales well to enjoy them. But I did spend a few minutes exploring the Jack and the Beanstalk wikipedia page to learn a little bit about the history of the stories and their modern adaptations as I did with the other books in the series. I am more familiar with this story than the previous two so I am not sure it is was as helpful or needed as it was in the previous two books.
At this point, I don’t know if I am waiting more impatiently for the next book in the Starborn series or the next book in the fairytale series.
I received a digital copy of this book in advance for purposes of review. I had already preordered a copy of the book when I asked for the advance copy.
Daughter of Rage and Ruin by K. B. Hoyle Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition