Review: Horse, Flower, Bird

Kate Bernheimer's collection of new world fairy tales is beautiful, compelling, and a little sinister

By Rachel Phipps
Published: October 5th, 2010 | 12:30pm

As an English student reading the opening pages of Kate Bernheimer's latest collection of short stories, Horse, Flower, Bird, I wanted to pick up my pen and highlighter to annotate the pages the way I would if I were reading Faust or Shakespeare and required to write an essay afterward. This time the reflex seemed to be calling to me through sheer curiosity rather than academic necessity.

As a fellow human, I felt compelled to look up Bernheimer and write her a nice, long, emotional email in response to the first story in the collection, 'A Cuckoo Tale"—an enticing narrative of juxtaposed Jewish and Catholic ideologies told through the eyes of a small girl that warrants just that; an emotional response.

The entire collection amounts to a beautiful little book of fairy tales meant for grown-ups. Throughout each story, an innocence shines through the voice—be it a small girl describing the acorn she befriends in "A Tulips Tale" or another's undying and alarmingly unnerving love for her pet parakeet in "A Cageling Tale." Every narrative presents us with a girl trying to escape from a desperate situation or just simply from her own miserable life. That seemingly none of these girls achieve this release adds a patina of sadness and austerity to the collection. Each of the eight individual stories are by no means predictable, but toward the latter end of the book you may find yourself overwhelmed by pathos for these heroines, for whom you develop a nagging feeling are doomed from the outset.

None of Bernheimer's offerings are overwritten or over-embellished, either. Each story lays bare bones prose—only what's necessary for the reader to gain an understanding of both the story and the overarching message without giving too much away. Bernheimer breathtakingly achieves this effect in such a way that, though stripped-down, the words flow and entice the reader in all the right places. It's what you'd expect from a seasoned author, but with an added dimension that I have rarely seen thread through a short story collection so well.

Some readers might be baffled by the form—the way some paragraphs live on their own separate pages. Flipping through the book, the whole thing looks bizarrely disjointed. However, each of Bernheimer's stories have left a lasting impression on me. I've been unnerved by them—and they left me thinking and asking questions. Horse, Flower, Bird is what I think might happen if Emily Dickinson, Hans Christian Anderson, and Emily Bronte all set out to write a bunch of fairy tales together. And it actually works beautifully.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Horse, Flower, Bird

by Kate Bernheimer

Coffee House Press, Septermber 2010

208 pages