Blackberry Blue and Other Fairy Tales

Jamila Gavin's Blackberry Blue and Other Fairy Tales is a set of six new stories for 9 year olds that sound as old as the forest they come out of.

What happens

A woodcutter's wife goes out for blackberries and cannot find any. She wanders further than she usually does, falls asleep on a bank, and wakes to a thin, hungry, abandoned baby's cry.

Then she sees the bramble patch. Enormous, glistening, loaded with the fattest berries she has ever laid eyes on. She picks until her fingers go purple and her blood runs into the juice. And then she cannot get out.

Right in the middle of all those thorns is a baby girl, skin as black as midnight, eyes shining like blackberries.

That is Blackberry Blue. The woodcutter and his wife take her home and love her. She grows up happy. Then they die, and she goes back to the bramble patch to ask her mother what to do, and a voice answers her out of the bush.

You can hear the old shapes in this one. The cruel new queen. A good prince and a bad one. Three balls, three dresses, and a warning about getting home before dawn.

But Gavin keeps shifting the pieces. The dress is made of bluebells and forget-me-nots. The girl rescues the prince rather than the other way round, and she does it wearing a cloak she has woven out of thorns.

It is properly lovely read aloud. Rhymes arrive in the middle of the prose, the way they do in a story that has been told rather than written. If bedtime reading is still a thing in your house, this is a very good one for it.

They are not soft stories, though. A young queen dies in the second paragraph. A boy who enjoys hurting animals and servants grows up into a wolf that springs out of the trees and tries to tear his brother to pieces. A prince is quietly poisoned, a bowl of soup at a time, for months.

That is fairly normal fairy-tale weather and most 9 year olds take it in their stride. If yours is the sort who lies awake after Hansel and Gretel, read the first story yourself before handing it over.

Six separate stories also means six chances to stop, which suits a reader who likes short bursts.

What to read next

For more of the famous tales in the hands of someone who has clearly thought hard about them, try Hilary McKay's Fairy Tales. Rapunzel's tower there is a squat black thing that smells of iron, and the children who spot it have a mother who loves birds.