I was fairly skeptical for the first 1/3, but there are a few stories in the middle that were wonderful and worth re-reading. I get the point of the format but I don't think it's worth it for most of them. Overall I found the collection interesting and I'm not against reading more of her work. Honestly anything consistently called 'strange' and 'spare' is worth the risk for me. ( )

This is a strange book. I mean that in the sense of curious or intriguing, and not in the sense of bizarre or alien.

It is deceptively simple: eight short stories, told in very clear and spare English, full of what seem to be unambiguous events. Why, then, did I finish each one and find myself wondering exactly what had been said?

They read just like fairy tales, with that dreaming-while-awake sensation, but there's little in the way of the supernatural...certainly no magic beans or sleep-inducing spindles. Unlike, say, reading the Brothers Grimm, you have to work at these. You don't get to the end and say, "Ah, well, Hansel and Gretel certainly tricked the witch, didn't they?" You glimpse swells under the surface: the unnerving voicelessness of characters, the sense that they are handicapped or perhaps not quite sane. You see fairy tale motifs turned on their heads as so many of the girls voluntarily take on their mistreatments: the starvation, the harsh burlap clothing. You see those swells, you notice those themes, and you wonder what else is down there below the surface.

This isn't a book for everyone. You have to be willing to read it...and think about it...and then have something else occur to you...and think some more. This is a review full of questions and that's exactly where that book leaves you. ( )

The Brothers Grimm cornered the market on fairy tales, and the original versions of them were often dark...far more frightening than the sanitized versions found in modern children's books. This collection of short stories by Kate Bernheimer entitled Horse, Flower, Bird is a dark collection of tales as well...not suitable for children, because under the seemingly simple stories lies a violent understory. The combination is disconcerting, and makes you wonder how the elements of fear and innocence could be combined so artfully.

I can't think of any short stories that are like this...the images create an almost instantaneous shot of pain, like a paper cut, when you grasp the author's meaning. For example, in "A Cuckoo Tale", a little girl speaks innocently of her feelings of guilt and anxiety (she didn't call it that) in a religious sense, so different from her Catholic friend. "There was no talk of heaven or hell in the girl's household. It was all about pogroms and rape." While she tries to live a child's life, visions of Jews herded into ovens fill her too-young imagination. She wonders why no one helped Anne Frank, who she calls "the girl who kept the diary."

In "A Doll's Tale", a little girl receives a beautiful doll as a gift...a doll far prettier than she. She didn't like it, and so "confused by this feeling-for Astrid was a kind and gentle being-her ambivalence became a kind of devotion." Her true feelings are revealed when she dumps it down a laundry chute. However, the loss of it soon leaves her lonely, and she invents an invisible-friend. There's no joy there, as the 'friend' suddenly disappears. A painfully memorable picture is created when her and her father drive around, looking for the beloved invisible friend:

"This second loss proved too much for her, really. Doll-less, invisible friend-less, finally more comfortable in fear than in gladness, Astrid began to live in her head...To outsiders, this...lent her a remarkably pleasing air, since she never had reason to interrupt anyone's talking."



Kate Bernheimer
 Even what promises to be an amusing story of little girls playing Jedi's from Star Wars takes a darker turn, when their imagination, fed by the careless conversations of adults, suddenly creates a world far more violent and ugly than the movie.

The stories, while diverse and mysterious, all contain a theme of the loss of innocence. And the source of such loss seems to be the a child's view of the world where an active imagination and lack of experience create troubling and sometimes dangerous visions. Sometimes the simplest words can create a landscape of horror. ( )

A delightful little gem of a book. Difficult to describe, definitely not for every reader, but a real find for the reader who likes quirky books. ( )