Sabrina Orah Mark's Happily: A Personal History--with Fairy Tales is a bubbling cauldron filled with ingredients as diverse as parenting and premonitions, mythological creatures and marriage, mothers and sons and fairies and witches, and always there is magic. Regular readers of her column in the Paris Review (also called "Happily") know that to follow the path of crumbs laid out by Mark is to enter willingly into a dream sequence of an essay, where one incongruent thing can lead to the next, forming its own kind of coherence and truth. In this collection of 26 essays, Mark demonstrates both a scholar's knowledge of fairy tales and the particular wisdom of a woman, both mother and daughter, navigating a world fraught with perils more viral than villainous.
Mark works easily in uncertainties, wondering aloud at countless maybes. In the opening essay ("Ghost People"), she walks a perimeter of concern around her son, who, she learns, is making Ghost People out of wood chips on the playground at school. After a brief narrative to set readers on her chosen path, she turns to Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, asking, "Maybe because Geppetto understands that sometimes the things we create to protect us, to give us good fortune, need first to thin us into a vulnerability where the only thing that can save us are those things that almost erased us. Where the only thing that can bring us back to ourselves is what brought us to the edge of our being in the first place. Or maybe it's just that Geppetto is lonely." At first glance, these two moments don't match, hanging loosely together as they do. But as Mark works, weaving between her personal stories and her careful observations of the fairy tale material, she proves herself worthy of every confidence, tying her children and the story of Pinocchio to the 2018 shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue in a haunting and reflective resonance.
In another essay, Mark explains that "Fairy tales are homemade stories turned inside out. You can see the threads, the stitching line, the seams." Mark's essays do much the same work, often ending somewhere far from where the reader may have expected; however, it is always exactly as it should be, the only "ever after" that could have come from such a "Happily" beginning. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian
Shelf Talker: These 26 essays are a cauldron bubbling with ingredients as diverse as parenting and premonitions, mythological creatures and marriage, mothers, sons, fairies and witches--and always there is magic.