With the subtitle: “A journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales”, it was inevitable that I would pick this up. I found out about this book from an excerpt on Travel Writing World, so I was very intrigued about the combination between fairy tale history and travel writing.

Spoiler alert: This book was heavier on the history and lighter on the travel. While Jubber does weave accounts of places that he visited into the text, the main focus of the book is on sketching out the lives of seven fairy tellers:

1. Giambattista Basile
2. Hanna Dyab
3. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve
4. Dortchen Wild
5. Ivan Khudiakov
6. Somadeva
7. Hans Christian Andersen

As you might be able to guess, it’s a pretty diverse group of authors, ranging from an Italian to a Syrian to a writer from Kashmir. In each section, Jubber intersperses his retellings of some of their tales between chapters on their life. Where appropriate, he describes what he found while visiting their cities, but I found this travel portion to be a smaller part of the book. Not that I’m complaining, because I was absolutely fascinated with these writers! I am very interested in Giambattista’s Tale of Tales and Somadeva’s Kathāsaritsāgara and I wonder if I’ll be able to get my hands on English translations of these.

By looking at the lives of these writers, we’re able to get a better insight into their stories. I enjoyed hearing about how Dyab’s life was reflected in his tales, such as in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and how its setting might have been influenced by Dyab’s hometown, and how the captain’s request for a dish with no-salt reflects a traditional Arab belief that salt binds a host and his guest. Or what about French female writers, whose attitudes towards marriage might have been reflected in the fact that many tales they wrote were about heroines who had to live with monsters? It’s fascinating to draw connections between the writers, the society they lived in and what they went through, and their lives.

Given how much I enjoyed this book, it may be surprising that I don’t have a favourite section. But that’s because I find all the authors profiled here to be fascinating! I think Jubber has done a good job selecting who he wanted to look into and uncovering more about them. There was, perhaps, the least amount of information in Somadeva’s section, but there was plenty of cultural information as well as discussion about how his tales may have influenced other fairy tales. I really enjoyed seeing the possible links between cultures!

If you enjoy fairy tales, I think you’ll enjoy this book! Not only did I get introduced to many different authors that I didn’t know before, I also came away with lots of new reading material.