“History is a fairy tale”, a subtitle in Veronica Schanoes’s story “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga”, could almost serve as an epigram for the whole of her first collection,
Burning Girls and Other Stories. Schanoes, who is a scholar of fairy tales, feminism, and Jewish literature and history, brings all of her considerable resources to bear in these 14 stories, which include most of the short fiction she published since 2003. And while there is an occasional tendency to embed snippets of historical lectures as a kind of ballast for her more visceral nightmares – “Truth can be told in any number of ways,” she tells us in the Goldman story – it never mitigates the passion and anger that is the real engine of her fiction. Almost as if to illustrate, the Goldman story begins by offering us alternate fairytale and historical modes of narrative: “Once upon a time there was a girl, the third and youngest daughter of a merchant” begins one paragraph,
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“History,” writes Veronica Schanoes, “is a fairytale.”
These words come at the midway point of Schanoes debut short story collection,
Burning Girls and Other Stories. The subtitle kicks off a particularly sharp-toothed tale in which the legendary anarchist Emma Goldman takes a brooding cup of tea with the equally legendary (if somewhat less well-sourced) Baba Yaga.
But the statement also serves a broader purpose, acting as a coalescing thesis for the philosophy of
Burning Girls the idea that what lies behind us, in newspapers, and photographs, textbooks and personal memories, is not just fiction. It is, instead, a fluid and magical text, a spellbook from which our futures are conjured.
Twenty-five years ago, five heroes risked their lives to defeat the bone maker Eklor a corrupt magician who created an inhuman army using animal bones. But victory came at a tragic price. Only four of the heroes survived. Since then, Kreya, the group’s leader, has exiled herself to a remote tower and devoted herself to one purpose: resurrecting her dead husband. But such a task requires both a cache of human bones and a sacrifice for each day he lives, she will live one less. She’d rather live one year with her husband than a hundred without him, but using human bones for magic is illegal in Vos. The dead are burned as are any bone workers who violate the law. Yet Kreya knows where she can find the bones she needs: the battlefield where her husband and countless others lost their lives. But defying the laws of the land exposes a terrible possibility. Maybe the dead don’t rest in peace after all. Five warriors one broken, one gone soft, one pursuing a simple life, one stuck in t