Endicott Mythic Fiction discussion

Hi, All.
The May selection is The Book of Ballads by Charles Vess - who's reading?

(My apologies for posting the June choice by mistake. Thanks for catching it, Endicott Readers! :) )


Group Members' Reviews

I checked out a copy from the library and read it in one afternoon. I had no experience with these ballads before and was delightfully intrigued by them, so much so that I sought out recordings of the ones retold in the book as well as the ones mentioned in the preface. They're wonderful songs and I'm glad I was exposed to them. The retellings of them in the book, however, left me rather nonplussed. I enjoyed the ones that fleshed out the ballads, like "Barbara Allen," but not so much the ones that basically illustrated the original ballad with no changes. "The False Knight on the Road," especially, was not even really a retelling, so I have no idea why Gaiman was credited with it. The art was very nice and definitely suited the tales, but overall I felt the book was a missed opportunity. So much more could be done with such wonderful source material. Just my thoughts...

I'm totally in - bought this one quite some time ago, and just never got around to reading it, so now's the time!

I totally agree with you Kyle, that was my exact reaction. I couldn't believe that some of the amazing writers featured didn't do more with their incredible source material. So many of them are capable of amazing retellings... why on earth did so many of these fall so flat?

Vess' illustrations are, as usual, gorgeous though.

I just got it in the mail today, I'm hoping to get some reading time in this weekend.

I read it today, and have to agree with Kyle and Brittany. It was an ok read, and the artwork was great. But I was expecting with such great authors there would be more "story" to it. The one credited to Neil Gaiman is very odd...there is no original writing to it, just the ballad.

I'm about 2/3 through, reading snippets here and there in between other stuff. I find that if I just sit down and read right through graphic novel, I'll start to just pay attention to the text, and not spend enough time on the illustrations.

I agree that I want more story than just the words of the original ballads themselves. that being said, a coworker does occasional comic book illustration, and he says that he's generally given a full script to illustrate. as in, "the knight swings his sword wildly and misses, while shouting "xyz!", as his squire looks on." so while we're only attributing the words on the page to the author, it's very likely that the authors had a whole lot to do with the description of the scenes being drawn around those words as well.