Shadow Talk by Robert Kelly (published 2021)

Shadow Talk: Twenty-Five New Fairy Tales by Robert Kelly with original drawings by Emma Polyakov is a rare find these days. These fairy-tales are not really adaptations from old classics or even new interpretations of them, they are uniquely from the author's imagination. However, even if they are new, they still carry something traditional and folkloric about them. Going back to the roots of the genre, the magic exists in them as something apart from the normalcy of the world, a magic that ends up within that world to help, to hinder, or to warn. Could it be the fae? All twenty-five fairy-tales exist in a slower-paced atmosphere, less action-packed than the rest. In each story, there is an encounter that brings the animal or human in the story into another kind of communication with the world touching on the magical.

Green Silk is about an ordinary girl who finds a mysterious and beautiful woman dressed in green silk reading a book in an unexpected place. After speaking with her, the girl is given the dress as a gift and finds she is granted a special power of "flow" upon wearing it, granting her the ability to come and go from reality to dreams as she pleases. The Boy in the Camel tells of a boy, born inside of a camel, who grows there and lives within the darkness and protection of the camel's body. But when a djinn notices the camel's vanity from keeping the boy within him, the boy is released into the light and is finally able to see others like him. The Wind and the Wolf relates a tale of how a wolf's beautiful and terrible howl kept the wind warm one cold night and how that howl was only possible, and so too the wind's speech, through the knowledge of fear.

These three story examples, the first most fairy tale-like - the second, fable, the third, folklore - share their blend genre characteristics (and all twenty-five do, in the end). Why and how does Kelly arrive at the fairy-tale as their shared authoritative form? Is it perhaps because these encounters a part of the fairy realm because the magic works with shadows and mirror-like reflections across nature, across science, across art? As readers peering into each story, time and time again the meaning will come across kaleidoscopically, changing over the course of our lives and by who is reading it, as ourselves are also changed.