Kissing the Witch- February 9th

My favorite story is hands down The Tale of the Handkerchief because of how truthful this women tells her life story. We are all very prone to wanting the greener grass on the other side of the fence but most of us never actually get the opportunity to actually have it. In this story these women actually get to trade their lives and make sacrifices to get what they need in the end. This women born a maid hated her life always catering to others and never being truly satisfied and what do you know, so did this princess born of the same year as the maid. So as “Freaky Friday” as an old Fairytale can get these women switch lives in order to fulfill their dreams of being someone else. I think that it is funny how it is in our human nature to envy something or someone at all. I really paid attention to how much the maid wanted to have the queens spot and the writer does a marvelous job at keeping that consistent until the very end. I do not know what part of this makes me feel like there was an underling twist but something is fishy about the women actually being able to follow through with living other lives then were planned out for them but then that was when I related to this story the most. At the end of the story there is a quote that genuinely tied my connection to this story all together. “I thought of how both of us had refused to follow the paths mapped out for us by our mothers and their mothers before them, but had perversely gone our own ways instead, and I wondered whether this would bring us more or less happiness in the end.” Funny how this is my life in a sentence and essentially the same scenario as the maid and the princess. I would never change my life for someone else’s but then again I have personally never felt like someone had a better life than I do. I do however make my own life decisions and choose my own paths even when they might be against what my mother says. I hate that I have had to actually write it down because now I look back and see all the choices that I have made against what I have been told. Now I don’t mean to sound like I regret them because I feel like each and every decision has molded me in to the women that I have become today and the decisions that I am making now are forming into the women I will become in the future, but I wish that I could agree with my mother on some of these this because they are big parts of my life. And I am sure by now you are thinking “There must be something specific that she is talking about.” Well there is and it happens to be that I am living a type of “Fairytale” story as well, the old famous “Romeo and Juliet” thing happened to me. I fell in love the son of a family my parents told me to stray away from. (Just like them) Truth of the matter is, we all end up doing what our heart tells us to do in the end despite the influences from others.

I feel like “Kissing the Witch” was given that title not only because Emma Donoghue ends this twisted plot with one of the best stories “The Tale of the Kiss” but because there was a consistent theme of women being strong willed for something that they want. Each and every tale was told by a strong, self- determined women and was based upon them being strong enough in the end to connect themselves with the other women in the stories. (“Who were you before a queen chose you as her horse? And the horse said, Will I tell you my own story? It is a tale of hair.”) “Kissing the Witch” gave modern day women a chance plan to their own paths and choose their own destinies like the women telling their stories in the book. Like I said in class, throughout this whole book I was picturing each princess, made, mother, daughter, wife, or widow at this coffee shop talking over some bagels and tea. This book was very cute and I thing that any women would enjoy being their own hero in the end and not having to rely on a man to come slay your dragon and rescue you from the top of the tower.