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my pie in the sky wishlist at powells. really though, i can get more book elsewhere for cheaper so i'm all about the gift certificates! ;)
i'm not interested in making any money off of any of this, i just wanted to be able to post the book cover pictures because that's prettier and more interesting.
theoretically, i would get a comission off of any purchases through this site, but a) i'm not expecting a dime, and b) if i do get a dime, it'll go to a charity. which? not sure. if you have any ideas/inclinations, please tell me.
also, check out the following sites for (usually) cheaper prices: bookfinder.com, alibris.com, overstock.com, & bookcloseouts.com.
a good read – not the best of her fairy tale adaptions, but still good. i liked that her boy calls her ‘the impertinent one’ and she’s all sassy with him, but still it’s a cindererlla story and i just never liked cinderella, don’t know why.
the description of the foot binding was gruesome and, probably, realistic, but still, i just feel like i see all this criticism about foot binding but soooo very little, if any, about corsets, for example, that european women used for centuries. in many cases, women broke ribs and even had ribs removed just to have small waists. now, that’s just as drastic in my book. i mean you have to breathe, you know? but i see so little criticism about it, much less creativity surrounding it, such as bound does with foot binding.
i like that she’s not writing just about white women, that’s good, especially as there’s such a richness of non-european fairy tales to choose from when writing adaptations. but the foot-binding thing? not digging it, however well it fits into the whole cinderella story.
(review written 06/12/05)
Just for the record, the business about the corsets and the rib removal isn’t true. See, e.g.:
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/vanities/ribs.htm
Am enjoying your reviews, thanks.
~ Tanuki
tanuki, although the tone and general thrust of the snopes article was really horrible and condescending, i haven’t been able to find any other sources to date that disputes their claim regarding rib removal. i did find this, however:
“Volunteers in a recent study, clad in 1870s-style corsets, experienced shortness of breath and reduced lung capacity, which explains Victorian women’s propensity for fainting. More seriously, long-term corset use led to atrophy of the back and abdominal muscles, resulting in pain when the wearer went corsetless. And doctors agree that corseting young girls would have deformed their ribs permanently. In pregnant women, stays inhibited the expansion of the uterus, which could well have led to miscarriages and difficult births (although no one knows how such constraint affected the fetus). Many women also suffered from prolapsed uteri after multiple pregnancies, and corsets aggravated the condition by exerting pressure on the stomach.”
(from a village voice article)
in light of this, i think my original point still holds true.
~ andrea