Description
While Danielle Dulsky’s The Night House has a great deal of potential, it leans a bit too much into woo-woo spiritualism and not enough into its subtitle — Folklore, Fairy Tales, Rites, and Magick for the Wise and Wild — for my taste.
The re-imagining of classic fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella are compelling and beautifully rendered, the author chose a collective pronoun approach or a second person “you” approach in the introduction and explanation sections book ending each fairy tale that takes away from the power of what she’s saying. Rather than noting that women, historically, have been relegated to expectations of domesticity or silence in service of the vision or dream of a man — the wolf, the prince — the use of “our” and “we” pronouns is distracting. Examples like “there are places inside us where we dare not look,” and “what meaning can you derive” make the book feel far more like self-help than spiritual or inspirational.
Still, if you are a fan of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, who was a mentor to Dulsky, you’ll likely find a great deal to enjoy about The Night House.
