The fourth and final tale in Archaia’s Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches miniseries is Jeff Stokely’s Vasilissa the Beautiful. Born into a village at the edge of the world, a village forgotten by god, our heroine is a little beacon of light and warmth. Until her mother dies. “Such cruelty,” our narrator muses, “makes you wonder where it comes from.”
Mortality is, more or less, the bane of human existence, wouldn’t you say? Looming over each of us, sometimes menacing and always mysterious, death is life’s only guarantee. Naturally, we fear it. We do not understand it and cannot prepare for it. For those of us left behind in its wake, it is tragic. It’s loss. But every living thing does it. Our very human response is to attempt to make sense of it, to make it okay. And we do this in a very human way. Storytelling. Matthew Dow Smith’s The Phantom Isle, tale three of four in Archaia’s Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches series, is a story about stories. And life. And death.
These Jim Henson Storyteller Witches books that Archaia is putting out are really remarkable. Kyla Vanderklugt’s, The Snow Witch,is a vaster contemplation of life and the human experience than stories ten times its length.
