Bound
in journal
by Donna Jo Napoli
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.
