Preview: The Painted Hall Collection by Anna Tan
Title: The Painted Hall Collection by Anna Tan
Genre: short stories, fantasy, fairy tales
Length : 20,030 words
Format: ebook. Price: USD 2.99
Publisher: Teaspoon Publishing
Available from 20 December 2018
Reviewer: Leon Wing
First off, this book is a collection, as the title tells you, with a single theme of the Painted Halls running through four stories. The symbols on the crest-like image on the cover: snow, flame, volcano, crown, in clockwise order from top left, are for the stories, When the Wind Blows, The Flame of the North, Beneath the Rumbling Earth, and A Still, Small Voice.
The constants of most fairy tales comprise the good elements, a prince, a princess, all the royals; and the bad ones, an evil witch, monster, magician. The good characters are wont to search the kingdom for a mate. They have to save the day by defeating the bad people. In order to do that they have to undergo some trials. Also, there is always someone or something or some creature who will guide them, offer advice, oracle or prophesy. And there will be charms or magic at play. In short, the reader is in for some adventure.
This book has all of those fairy-tale elements, in fact. However, they are not as straightforward as them. For instance, instead of a handsome prince, you have a fisherman’s son Danis, from a place where he swims “like a dolphin in a diamond sea”. He is not fair skinned nor blue-eyed, but has black hair and brown skin like “polished wood”. The catch is he is twenty but looks forty, which doesn’t do him any favours when he goes to find a wife. The town’s pretty maidens all reject him, even a widow. But as fairy tales go, he continues his search. And inevitably, he meets a dragon, who tells him to go north to a cold place, the City of Winter, where the wind blows cold. He meets the princess Hana, and here the pace of the story picks up. He can win her hand only by undergoing some trials to lift a curse upon her kingdom.
To keep from going too much on the plot, let’s suffice to say that in the next three tales, you get more action scenes, with the scions fighting battles with evil elements, using magic most of the time; and there are revelations, surprising ones.
The author promises readers old-school fairy tales. So, you won’t find anything as untraditional and as extreme as the reworked fairy tales of Angela Carter. In these days when even once straight-laced and family-oriented Disney is allowing in LGBTQ characters, the rainbow letters on the book cover do not reflect the traditional values one of the characters espouses: “Because that is the way of the world. A man needs a woman and a woman needs a man. And when—if—they find each other, a beautiful thing happens.”
The stories are written competently, in a simple language readable for young readers, without resorting to the writing style you would find in classic fairy tales. However, there are certain quirks. Like in ”…they sat by their campfire, warming their hands and burning their meat.“ And two instances of the same word used in “The whale swum ponderously…”, and “She waved back and swum to him.” I gather that that is because I’m previewing an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) or uncorrected proof copy of the book.
The four tales or short stories you find in it are previously available as standalone books or singles. But, not only is it more convenient to read all of these singles in one place instead of opening up separate copies, you also get, at the closing pages, a bonus story not related to the other four tales. “Shattered Memories” offers a taster of the author’s upcoming Absolution trilogy.
Though the book is touted as a collection, it would be preferable to read each in the sequence laid out. Because they are all linked by a single theme, the collection also works like a novella.
Anna Tan grew up in Malaysia, the country that is not Singapore. In 2015, she traded in a life of annoying other bean counters for one of annoying the online world with questions about life and death and everything in between. The answer is sometimes 42. Sometimes they try to eat you.
When she is not writing or nitpicking over other writers’ copy, she can be found reading a book or attempting to organise her room.
