Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales by Sarah Maitland

This is a difficult book to review because it has many many good points but there are areas where I feel a little uncomfortable with what Maitland has written.

Maitland breaks her book down into 12 chapters, visiting 12 forests one a month from March through to February.  Some are familiar names, like the Forest of Dean, the New Forest and Keilder Forest, others like Airyolland Wood and The Purgatory Wood are more obscure.  In her writings on these forests Maitland writes beautifully and eloquently on the history of each woodland and her experience within them, also reflecting on the way that the histories of the woods and that of fairytales are intertwined.

Between each chapter she gives us a fairytale but written from a new and thought provoking perspective, for instance, we hear from Hansel as he and Gretel have grown to adulthood and his thoughts on their experiences in the forest, from the woodcutter of Red Riding Hood and his reasons for becoming a recluse.  Last of all Maitland gives us an appropriately bewitching poetic history of the woodlands of Britain in the dreams of Briar Rose.

There is so much of interest in what Maitland has to say but there are things missing and she does at times repeat herself.  For instance, the focus appears to be on the Grimm canon of fairy tales, when she speaks of the Seven Swans fairytale she does not mention Hans Christian Andersen's similar The Twelve Swans and how the two relate.  However, these are small complaints, this is a book from which I learned much and was charmed by, a book that sends me straight back out to the woods.