Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

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Fairy tales and folk tales have always been important—as a blueprint for expecting the worst, or as a suggestion that you might make it after all; some wolves can be killed. To look at a tale is to look at the story itself, the hidden stories behind it, the world in which it was written, the ways it’s changed and why. One of the reasons that fairy tales continue to fascinate us is because to examine any aspect of that story is to be retelling it already—asking questions, looking for more.

“The Lenten Rose” is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” which has always been a favorite of mine, largely for the things it doesn’t tell us, the little dark places waiting for a light.

Particularly, it leaves Kay and Gerda sitting on the balcony as their journey vanishes from their minds, leaving them, the story suggests, essentially unchanged from the children they were when they began it. But of course that’s not how journeys go; that’s where my story starts.

Genevieve Valentine

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The Lenten Rose


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Genevieve Valentine


The roses out on the roof were in full bloom . . . and Kay and Gerda seated themselves each on their own chair, and held each other by the hand, while the cold empty grandeur of the Snow Queen’s palace vanished from their memories like a painful dream . . . And they both sat there, grown up, yet children at heart; and it was summer—warm, beautiful summer.

—“The Snow Queen,” Hans Christian Andersen

Two strangers are living in a house.

It’s summer; warm, beautiful summer.

The house is choked by roses—white, always white, nothing must be red any more.

Every window has heavy curtains. He closes the curtains at the first frost, every year, and doesn’t open them again until the roses bloom.

She’s tried to kill the roses, a hundred times.

When Ensio found Gerda, back on the day when Kay went missing, she was walking home from the shop, across the bridge toward the other side of the river, where her grandmother’s house was pressed in the center of a little row of houses (from her garret window she could see the water until the bend, where the trees closed over it).

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He reached her at the very center of the bridge.

“Kay’s mother’s had a telegram,” he said.

She sat on the wall, and when Ensio tried to hold her she turned so her legs dangled off the edge, and when he asked, “Gerda, what can I do?” she said, “Find my grandmother, she’ll know,” and he set off running like he loved her.

She cried until her jacket split up the back; she cried until her new red shoes fell one by one into the water.

A pair of crows was circling.

She thought, like a dreamer thinks, I can find him if they can’t.

When she dropped, there was an empty boat waiting, pointed north.

In school, when Kay was still a little boy, the teacher showed that Finland was shaped like a woman, arms reaching upward.

She’s beautiful, the teacher promised, the most beautiful woman of all; the guardian of a nation.

It was good to know. Gerda was lovely sometimes, when they were playing in the snow and she looked at him and laughed, but now Kay knew it wasn’t serious.

There was real beauty, somewhere far away. It felt like a brave thing to think.

If Kay saw a face sometimes, when he looked out the window in winter—two lines of frost shining off her high wide cheekbones, lips the color of milk ice, sharp black eyes rimmed just at the edge of the iris with blue—wasn’t it just the Finnish Maiden?

(It was a lie, of course, the sort of lie children tell themselves when they’re trying to be patriots.

Some stories are older than others; those your grandmother tells before any school can reach you.

It was the Snow Queen.

Once, she smiled at him.

He pressed his hands to the glass. Around her white hair, everything was winter and dark.)

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? Genevieve Valentine ?