Mihi Ever After
Tae Keller
A fairy tale untelling
Recently I've read a bunch of fairy tale retellings. (Thank you, Marissa Meyer!) Tae Keller's Mihi Ever After made a refreshing change. In it, as the publisher tells us, Mihi and her new friends Savannah and Reese discover a portal to a fairy tale realm, and they get a chance to learn how to be princesses. If you were in the business of collecting fairy tale realms found in portal fantasy, you would judge this a fairly typical one. What happens there, though, is not.
Keller won a Newbery Medal for her novel When You Trap a Tiger. (Thus, the "Winner of the Newbery Medal" notation on the cover of Mihi Ever After accurately refers to author Tae Keller. The publishers are obviously being a little sneaky here, hoping you'll think this book is a Newbery Medalist.) When You Trap a Tiger fully deserves the honor -- it's an entrancing tale that combines Korean folklore with a real-life story. (My review.) But perhaps the most interesting part to me was Keller's Author's Note, in which she describes how her Halmoni (that's grandmother -- 할머니) told her stories of ghosts and tigers. When later in life she looked up these old Korean stories, she couldn't find her Halmoni's stories. "Maybe my halmoni had told different versions, and invented some entirely."
Thus Keller was launched on her career of literary crime: making new fairy tales. As I wrote in my review of Tiger
Keller respects and reveres her Korean heritage. However, she is also aware that in Korean culture women and girls are traditionally kept quiet and off-stage. ... In the Author's Note, Keller explains how she came to see the Tiger as a symbol of a girl's freedom. Thus the book combines respect for Korean tradition with a kind of rebellion against it.
That, making fairy tales anew, is what Mihi Ever After is about. And if I gave any more detail, I would spoil it, so I'll leave it at that.