Review of Ruth Nestvold's "Never Ever After: Three Short Stories"

A few days ago I purchased the Kindle edition of Ruth Nestvold's Never Ever After: Three Short Stories. I've been busy with teaching, writing my dissertation prospectus, and auditing a Victorian literature class, and so I couldn't quite find the time to read it. This morning I pressed myself some coffee, went into my office, sat down, shut the door, and read it, the world be damned.

Here's my review of it.

Let me make some general comments about Nestvold's style in this anthology before I move on to look at each story separately. First off, I'm struck by her lyricism. Although she's writing in a novelistic style (not so much in the second story), there is a kind of poetry to her language, a rhythmic and musical quality to it. Unlike texts that hew completely to a novelistic style--where the reader can "forget" the language and thereby concentrate on the story--Nestvold's stories really make you revel in a good turn of phrase. Consider this passage: "She wound her way through the men like smoke, wafting by them, teasing." Such a beautiful simile! Her lyricism conforms, I think, to her subject matter, which straddles the line between traditional medieval romances and fairy tales.

Let me briefly say something about each story.

The first story, "A Serca Tale," is really interesting because it takes a fresh perspective on the epic hero. The epic hero in this story is not the "good guy" or protagonist. He's the antagonist who the main characters flee. The narrative is quite simple, consisting mostly of a flight away from a castle; and yet, the pleasure of this story is in the telling.

The second story, "King Orfeigh," was my favorite. This story is stylistically ambitious. The narrative style relies upon a commanding or "imperative" verb tense. For example, "You walk into the room. You go downstairs. You drink a cup of coffee." This narrative style has a strange way of alienating you from the story and bringing you closer into it. It definitely conforms to the emotional crisis being experienced by the main character, a wandering bard/king.

The final story, "Happily Ever After," is fun. It's an example of a kind of fiction I like to call a "revisionist fairy tale." The beauty of these stories are that they remind us that fairy tales are different than our lives. By juxtaposing psychological depth onto fairy tale characters, the lives of the fairy tale characters start to resemble our own. We start to wonder: if my life was a fairy tale, what kind would it be?

Conclusion: a wonderful collection of short stories that are stylistically beautiful and emotionally rich. I aim to read more of Nestvold.

If you're interested, here is a link to the book on Amazon.com: Never Ever After: Three Short Stories