I would like to thank the publisher, Crooked Lane Books, for the opportunity to read Little Darlings by Melanie Golding.

Soon to be a major motion picture.

Publisher:  Crooked Lane Books

Cover:  Melanie sun

Amazon  /  Goodreads

MY REVIEW

I was immediately hooked by the introduction. I’m not only curious, I am horrified by what she is about to do. Now I need to know why

Lauren Tranter had just delivered twins and as she held Morgan, she wondered why she didn’t feel the overwhelming love she had heard so much about. She was filled with doubts, but don’t all new mothers feel that way?

DS Harper saw the 911 call. Even though it had been cleared, something niggled at the back of her mind. She couldn’t let it go. She went to the hospital to check on Lauren Tranter, even though she was ordered to let it go. Her spidey senses were tingling and she had learned to listen to them. She had no desire to move up in the system, so she would walk that fine line and buck the system when she felt she must.

Was Lauren seeing things, hallucinating? The filthy muddy fish smell still lingered in her hospital room. And the cut on her hand? Where did that come from? Did she do it to herself?

I am trying to figure out where we are heading. What is really going on? Melanie Golding does a great job of keeping the mystery hidden. The story moves at a steady pace and I keep getting more anxious with each chapter read. I love the mounting tension and anticipation.

Little Darlings is a riveting tale of psychological thrills and chills and it may leave you, like me, wondering…Is it all in her mind? Are the folk tales of changlings true? You decide.

This is Melanie Golding’s debut novel and I only see good books coming from her in the future. Keep on writing, Melanie, and I’ll keep on reading.

I voluntarily reviewed a free copy of Little Darlings by Melanie Golding.

4 Stars

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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and dramatist who became one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature, was born on this day in 1865.

Weekly haul from McKay Used Books.

(Plus bonus movies: The Princess Bride and Stranger than Fiction)

Another childhood read - apparently I'm still on a roll with those. This is a Dover paperback from 1969, and I've lost track of how many times I read as a child. It wasn't until this reread that I really thought about how I've never known how to pronounce any of these names - and still have no clue. Names like Pokati-Goroshek, Pilipka, Hiysi, and Altyn-Saka. Even my favorite - Basil Fet-Frumos - I'd remembered as Fret-Frumos.

I'd also never thought to look up Irina Zheleznova, who selected and translated the stories in this book. She doesn't seem to have a website (in English, that I could find that is), but if you check her name on any book site you'll find lots of material. I think there are a lot of children that have her to thank for introducing us to these fairy tales.

It's thanks to her that I know what a yurt is! But since there were no web images to look up back then I only had a sketchy idea of what they looked like. And I'm only now looking up how you play the game of knucklebones (which is mentioned in a lot of folktales around the world). But then I bet there are a lot of kids now who've never heard of the game of jacks (I was not good at it, I preferred to spin them).

The witch Baba Yaga always confused me. In some stories she's - well, not nice exactly - but you can go ask her for advice and she won't immediately try to kill you. While in other stories she will indeed immediately try to kill you. It's actually thanks to Baba Yaga that I remembered this book, come to think of it.

A few days ago I was randomly looking at things on youtube (the ol' one vid leads to another game) and found myself remembering the 1964 film Jack Frost - a Soviet film originally called Morózko. I'd seen it in the 1970s when a midwestern tv channel would schedule dubbed foreign films for their weekly Children's Theatre show. Which resulted in me watching some really bad and weird foreign children's films. For some reason I fell in love with this particular film - I'm betting it has something to do with Father Mushroom, and also that Baba Yaga's house really walks (a little) on chicken legs. Anyway, I found a youtube version of the film which is much longer than the dubbed version - probably because it has singing.

Morozko, with English Subtitles (1 hr 18 min)

You'll be able to tell from the editing that this is not an entirely professional film. But the quality and color in this print is insanely better than the one I saw as a child. I also learned thanks to the subtitles that I missed out on a lot of rhyming dialog. Because of the over-the-top characters, Baba Yaga played by a male actor, slapstick - it reminded me of the UK's panto. (Am wondering if there's the same tradition in Russian children's theater?)

If you decide to actually watch some of this - Father Mushroom first appears around 14 minutes in. Maybe someone can tell me what's up with those little bell things he's always ringing. Also speaking of fashion - because Father M's hat is stylin' - check out the embroidery on everyone's outfits. Father Frost/Jack Frost's is especially fab. I envy his coat.

How good a movie is this? Um, well, MST3K used it, which I think says it all. (I don't think it's one of their better episodes though.) So yes, cheese factor is high.

Earlier in the week I'd thought I'd try and spend parts of today playing video games (in order to find out if the man studying dragons who complains he's never observed their feeding habits gets eaten by one, because my bet is yes) - but somehow the plan morphed into "drink way too much caffeine, intake sugary things, and read childrens' books!" Not that I struggled much trying to avoid it. I was here, the books I'd remembered yesterday, and here we all are.

On to the review - which, look, I'm actually posting now! (It's the caffeine, I swear. I've now had three times my usual amount. I should do this more often.)

Do you remember the first time you watched the film (Gene Wilder version) of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? And the point where you realized that this wasn't just a magical journey into a fantasy factory but was instead a story about awful people being murdered one by one? I hadn't read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None at that point, but boy, are there parallels! And I'll admit I was honestly pleased to watch the awful, awful children disappear in various deadly scenarios. (The film reassures us later that they're alive but we don't see them again, so I was never really convinced. Also if it was really a Christie story I suppose it'd turn out that the evil parents planned it all together, as they all wanted to be rid of their villainous spawn. ...Spawn is such a perfect word there, isn't it? Sounds much more slimy than offspring. Hmmm, where was I going with this...)

It's that sort of glee that I felt as I read Tales from the Brothers Grimm and the Sisters Weird. (Though there aren't many murders in the book. Actually just one. Or maybe two - it's hard to tell. And I don't count chapter nine.) There are SO many fairy tales where people do awful things yet end up rich and married to royalty, so it's wonderfully refreshing to have that pointed out (often by characters within the story) and then turned upside down. A few of these were endings I didn't even realize I'd wanted - because again, ugh, so many annoying princesses and princes running around.

An aside on how I picked up this book in the first place. For a number of years when my mom retired she and my dad were volunteer readers for local public schools. This is when locals come in and spend time reading aloud to children, and then talk with them about the books. It may sound easy, but it's pretty much like any reading group - you read the book beforehand, make notes, and you also mark some of the stories to make them more easily read aloud. Also to cut down the time, because depending on the age group, kids are only going to sit still for a certain amount of time.

Anyway, some of the kids books were donated after they'd been read/used, but my folks kept a great deal of them, mainly because many of them are both funny and classics. And also because I said "hey, don't give that away, I eventually want to read that!" So there are a ton of children's books here that I never have read and most of which are new to me. This is one I remember reading reviews on and mentally putting on a TBR list back in the mid 1990s.

I think my top "I never DID like that character!" moment from fairy tales was the princess with the golden ball in The Frog Prince. Without spoiling it, let's just say that the frog critiques her perfectly, and acts accordingly. Which I'd file under Happy Ending. In fact there are multiple instances of one of the Happily Ever After couple instead deciding "nope, not for me!" Randomly, in a completely different (and darker) tone, the Hansel and Gretel story is nicely creepy yet managing to still be fairly kid safe. In the same way the 1960s film Village of the Damned is. (Actually both are pretty creepy, it depends on how much you think about them.)

There are multiple stories, but also poems and a few short bits. And humor all over the place.

Now to figure out how to quote some of this without spoiling too much...