Title Baba Yaga Laid an Egg Series --- Author Dubravka Ugrešic Cover Art --- Publisher Canongate Books - 2007 First Printing Canongate Books - 2007 Category Retellings Warnings None Main Characters Beba, Pupa, Kukla Main Elements ---

"Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology."

"But what does she have to do with a writer's journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf of her mother?"

"Or with a trio of women who decide in their old age to spend a week together at a hotel spa?"

By the end of Dubravka Ugresic's novel, the answers are revealed. Her story is shot through with spellbinding, magic, involving a gambling triumph, sudden death on the golf course, a long-lost grandchild, an invasion of starlings, and wartime flight, the consequences of which are revealed only decades later.

The summary blurb asks some very good questions...

The Canongate series has been extremely frustrating. Some books in the series are absolutely amazing retellings of myths and folklore. Others, just feel like the author wanted to tell their own tale and then tried to force some connection to some myth, like Canongate said, "We need an author from this particular country, let's see if they have a handy manuscript lying around that can by some tenous thread be tied so some older tale". This feels like like one of those. The story itself is not terrible, a story about older women dealing with the world around them and interacting with the people they meet. But I had to kind of force myself to keep reading, since I didn't want to read a tale about regular old women, I wanted to read something about Baba Yaga. I'm only vaguely familiar with her stories but nobody had a hut running about on chicken legs and no one used a mortar and pestle for transport. And unless you want to convince me that just the fact the protagonists were elderly that implies they are nasty hags involved in witchcraft...yeah.

Then at the very end you get this weird flip, where a character in the first part of the story then starts a scholarly analysis of the tale, teaching us about Baba Yaga, her origins and symbology and how they appear in the first part of the book...honestly that doesn't solve the problem. Yeah, kind of cool that I get a university level study of the legend of Baba Yaga (but again, I wanted a story, not a text book), but what kind of book needs fifty pages to try to explain in what way the first part of the book has anything at all to do with the folklore it was supposedly retelling? If it wasn't obvious enough for your standard reader, then you made it way too obscure. It falls flat, like when you need to explain a joke, it's just not funny at that point.

I'm sure some people will enjoy this as the fictional tale of the adventures of a few elderly women, but don't read this in the hopes of something remotely falling into the category of "fantasy" (other than the fact that fiction is "made up" and thus all fiction is fantasy...)