Every Goose A Swan

A sweet and heartwarming retelling of "Tattercoats," a lesser-known Cinderella variation from Britain, in which there's no evil stepmother and no fairy godmother but the neglected grandchild of an embittered lord who forces her to live like a pauper at his own household, and a gooseherd as the kind soul that makes it possible for her to go to the ball and meet the prince.

There's no glass slipper here, either, not that it makes it any the less lovelier. And Pamela Sherwood captured the warmth and cheerfulness of the original quite well. I liked especially how she expanded on the relationship between Tallie, the lord's grandchild, and Silas, the gooseherd. In the original, there's so little about their rapport, and he disappears once she's chosen by the prince as his bride. Not here, he gets his own happily ever after, and the chemistry between him and Tallie, of a fatherly nature, was to me better than between her and Morgan. He basically stole the plot for me, and I almost didn't want Tallie to become a princess to keep reading about her, Silas, and the lovely people from her grandfather's household, so I was happy that the story ends satisfyingly with him.

In Every Goose a Swan, Pamela Sherwood tells an important tale of kindness, resilience, and love through the vehicle of a Cinderella retelling. Tallie has grown up on an estate, her grandfather a member of the landed gentry. Enviable? Not at all. When her mother married against her grandfather's wishes and died in childbirth, the old man vowed never to look on his granddaughter, so Tallie grew up lonely, despised, and mistreated by the servants and staff. If not for her kind old nurse and a mysterious gooseherd, she may have never known her worth, but with the help of old Martha and quirky Silas, she learned that she was kind, strong, and worthy of attention.
When her grandfather is summoned to a festival honoring the king's son, recently returned from abroad, Tallie hopes to go, but her grandfather ignores her and threatens Martha when she tries to fight for Tallie. As her grandfather's carriage pulls away, Silas persuades Tallie to go to the festival with him...and his geese. When ruffians threaten them on the journey, a stranger comes to their aid and accompanies them to Riversedge where the festival is being held. As they cover the distance to Riversedge, the handsome stranger and Tallie fall for each other, and when he begs that she attend the ball as his guest, she is so blinded by her love, that she agrees. Only as the ball draws near does she begin to question her lack of gown, her ignorance of dances and courtly etiquette. Silas reminds her that she gave her word, but she has no idea what she will find when she enters the royal ballroom.
Once again, Sherwood has given readers a timeless tale in beautiful style that shows how much we all share -- the need to be accepted, the power of love, the value of knowing one's worth. I loved every word of Every Goose a Saw, and the companion stories that accompany it show her talent in fleshing out the stories of the past to given them new life.

I don't even have a subcategory for fairy tales, I read so few of them; though I loved fantasy from the gitgo, that excluded fairy tales after I turned seven and was given a Hans Christian Andersen collection. Though I was never exactly clueful, even I began to see that if a character was a girl (or even a female thing, such as the toy ballerina) they came to no good. I read everything dutifully in those days, and I distinctly recall anxiously surveying the opening of the next story, hoping it would be about a boy because then it had a better chance of a happy ending. Two years later, I checked out from the school library an anthology called Tales of Laughter, which started off with "The Little Mermaid." Laughter? Really?

Many years after that, I read the tales gathered by the Grimm brothers in German, and found myself far more interested in the glimpses of the splintered cultures caused by the Thirty Years War in the tales than in the tales themselves (which could be both weird and bloody). But they were firmly categorized as fairy tales in those days.

So . . . I've tended to side-eye fairy tales ever since. That said, I'm twice as glad when I come across fairy tales I enjoy. And "Tattercoats" was once of those. When I saw on NetGalley that this retelling engaged with "Tattercoats", I grabbed it, and I'm so glad I did. I now have a perfect gift idea for two nieces, who are exactly at the age to enjoy this book.

What we have here is not a novel, but a novella, with a novelette/short story, a short piece, and a glimpse of a tale to come. They are all delightful. The author is faithful to the story beats of the Tattercoats tale, which today might suffer for some readers for the insta-love aspect; here, Tallie is given such a sunny personality, and the prince so thoughtful and kindly a character, that one can believe that this couple didn't need any longer than a smile and a dance to fall in love. As can happen in real life.

The best part of the tale, though, wasn't Tattercoats' story, but that of the faun Silvanus, whose character was instantly appealing. As Tallie's friend the goose herd, seeming more than he is, he was intriguing and charismatic, and I was glad to see he got a tale of his own in the next story.

I can see kid readers adoring this book, and older readers who are in the mood for something they can read late at night and know that when they put the book down they will be smiling. Such a sprightly, lovely book!