Book Review: Goose Chase

Title: Goose Chase

(Amazon just seems not to be cooperating with the terms of its Associates Program these days. No automatic linker on Blogspot, no link generator on the Amazon page. I don't know whether any of you did in fact buy any other book that's been reviewed here; if so, the sales aren't showing up as credits on my page. Maybe they want to discontinue the whole program of paying commissions on whatever bloggers help them sell.)

Author: Patrice Kindl

Date: 2001

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

ISBN: 978-0-547-33162-5

Length: 214 pages

Quote: "I suppose that from now on adventures will be coming my way whether I like it or not.”

This fairy-tale-as-modern-fiction is not a retelling of “The Prince and the Goose Girl,” nor is it a retelling of “The Twelve Wild Swans.” It’s a mash-up of both of those and some other tales. Alexandria Aurora Fortunato thinks of herself an independent, even arrogant, sturdy peasant. She and her mother were poor, and she’s not sure why she’s still working with her now-deceased mother’s whim that the geese could never be cooked or sold, but she is. She still calls her twelve geese by human names, makes them little gowns and crowns, and pretends they are princesses. It’s a fantasy romance, so this turns out to have been a good idea.

Much to Alexandria’s annoyance, her fairy godmother makes her magically beautiful and rich, with irksomely magical blonde hair. As a result she’s courted by Prince Edmund, a slow thinker, and King Claudio, a real jerk. When the geese help her escape from both, she falls (against their advice) into the custody of three ogresses… 

Well, it’s a frivolous flight of fancy, and I laughed. I will admit, though, that I laughed at Kindl as much as with her, especially in the scene where the poor mother tells the children she doesn’t know how she’s going to feed “all of thee.” The function of “thee” and “thou” in English was to express “you and only you, one special person,” which was why these words survived in formal prayers (addressing God the Father as a child speaking to its father), petitions to monarchs (ditto), wedding vows and love letters (emphasizing the unique quality of the relationship, long after everybody was saying “you” to employees), and other intimate conversation. The poor mother wails, in the classic Scottish lullaby, “What shall I do wi’ ye?” It would have been “ye” in England, too.

If you’re in the mood for a frivolous fanciful story where the fairy-tale royalty have very realistic humanlike personalities, you’ll enjoy Goose Chase.