A Concise Compendium of Wonder (Ceridwen Dovey, Ursula Dubosarsky & Jennifer Mills, Pink Shorts Press)

Developed in collaboration with South Australian theatre company Slingsby, A Concise Compendium of Wonder is a triptych of fairy tales by Ceridwen Dovey, Ursula Dubosarsky and Jennifer Mills, adapted to address “growing climate anxiety”. The book’s publication will coincide with the theatre production of the same name. In Dovey’s “The Tree of Light”, a 12-year-old “elder” narrates a futuristic rendition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl to a dwindling colony of Moonfolk impatient to return to the grim business of survival. Dubosarsky refashions Oscar Wilde’s Christian allegory The Selfish Giant into “The Giant’s Garden”, a celebration of the courage that children draw from their imagination. And in Mills’s adaptation of Hansel and Gretel, “The Childhood of the World”, accountability for the poverty that drives the children into the forest is restored to the ruling class. Like the stories of Ursula K Le Guin, each tale is as much about the world the characters inhabit as it is about the characters themselves. Mills’s forest in “The Childhood of the World” has “its own intelligence […] its own languages, its own ceremonies”, and the young heroine of “The Giant’s Garden” is roused to action by a “sublime, secret snail song” only she can hear. The stories in this collection show us there is hope, if only we can imagine other ways of coexisting with the nonhuman world.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Megan Cheong is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

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