Based loosely on the Brothers Grimm's "The Juniper Tree," this feminist fairytale of a single mother and an enchanted friendship will stay in readers' minds for its gruesome and hypnotic telling, and for its happy ending.
Barbara Comyns (1909–1992) was born in Bidfordon-Avon, in the English county of Warwickshire. She was the author of several books, including Sisters by a River, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, The Vet’s Daughter, The Skin Chairs, and Out of the Red into the Blue, a work of nonfiction about Spain, where she lived for eighteen years. Sadie Stein is a writer and critic living in New York. She is a contributing editor to The Paris Review.
"A treasure from the 1980s...[The Juniper Tree] picks up the Grimm
notion that an excess of maternal happiness can prove
fatal...Comyns's prose is vivid and charmingly hurried... The Grimm
story is about evil, revenge, and justice—an eye for an eye—but The
Juniper Tree is about accidents, damage, and repair." —Christine
Smallwood, Harper's
“Comyns has a pictorial eye, and though she wrote stories from a
young age, she originally thought of herself as a sculptor and
painter...[her] wild but exact style is always instantly
recognizable, a mix of looseness and compression.” —Jé Wilson, The
New York Review of Books
“The novel . . . achieves a life of its own, and allows Bella to
emerge at last from her ordeal with a feminist, fertile, happy,
fairy-tale ending. Hypnotic and enthralling in the
process.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful . . . there’s also something
uniquely original about her voice. Tragic, comic and completely
bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a
neglected genius.” —Lucy Scholes, The Observer
“The Juniper Tree, which appeared in 1985, is one of Comyns’s most
successful, confident and curious productions. It has the clear
pure narrative quality of a fable, but also shows a humanity and
maturity.” —Margaret Drabble
“The Juniper Tree is a fairy tale that haunts me because even at
the end the evil in it is never wholly undone. Through her
reimagining of the wicked stepmother figure, Comyns speculates
convincingly as to how damage escalates despite all conscious
attempts to limit itself.” —Helen Oyeyemi
“I don’t think there is any other novelist I’ve come across who
writes so subtly the disturbing and the domestic.” —Stuck in a Book
(blog)
“Comyns approaches the world as if everything is worthy of
clear-eyed attention. In this novel in particular, she is better
than any other writer I know at striking an impossible balance
between accuracy, wonder, and disgust.” —Brian Evenson, The
Rumpus
“Comyn’s [CE1] voice has childlike qualities; she looks at
everything in the world as though seeing it for the first time. In
later books, though, her narrators’ naivety is deployed in order to
provoke horror; the gap between what the reader knows and the
narrator doesn’t serves to make the reader fascinated and fearful.”
—Emily Gould, The Awl
“Here is a beautifully organized, well-written book that reads
almost conversationally.... Delicate, tough, quick moving, it’s a
haunting book...an amazing achievement...” —Financial Times
“Comyns’s heroines, and her novels, are plaintive, strange, and
robust all at once.... As an exercise in reconstruction, using the
old ingredients but producing a fable for a different age, The
Juniper Tree could hardly have been more satisfactorily
accomplished.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“Hypnotic and enthralling.”—Kirkus Reviews
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