Gingerbread by Robert Dinsdale

A boy is brought to the house of his grandfather, a bleak tenament flat in a Belarussian town.  His mother is dying of cancer and has brought her son to live with her father.  Slowly, reluctantly, Grandfather, or Papa, begins to tell the boy and mother the stories he told to her as a child.  Of Baba Yaga, the deep forests, and of the mighty Winter King and the King in the West who fought a terrible war over Belarus when it was Poland.

The mother's dying wish is for her ashes to be scattered with those of her mother in the great ancient forest beyond the town.  Grandfather, or Papa, is deeply reluctant but on a day when the roads are deep in ice he relents and takes the boy and his mother's remains out to a near ruined house.  It becomes clear that Papa is not afraid of the forest, he is afraid of not wanting to leave it.  Daily Papa remains in the house only venturing to collect the boy from school, then one day he does not come and the boy goes in search of him.

It is the beginning of a stunning magical cartwheeling story where boy and grandfather leave the urban for the wild and enter a world of stories, of partisan fighters who retreated to safety among the trees, of women and children massacred and the trees that drank too deeply of their blood and have become wicked, of survival, and love.

Dinsdale weaves the two parts of his story - narrative and folklore, together in such a skillful way that both drive each other.  Crises come, injury, new people in the forest, decisions to be made over loyalty, faithfulness and friendship, but always the ancient forest full of wildlife is a world beyond narrative where the past and present are bound together.

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.