Title: The Stillness of the Sky
Author: Starla Huchton
Rating: 7/10
Retelling of: Jack and the Beanstalk
The Twist: Genderbending mainly, but also weaving in other fairy tales, and generating sympathy for the giants, rather than malice or violence
Finally got around to reading the next in Starla Huchton’s Flipped Fairy Tales series. This one is based on Jack and the Beanstalk, but aside from the encounter with the beanstalk visit itself, the story actually heavily deviates away from the traditional story.
I don’t actually consider this a bad thing, because instead of detailing numerous visits up a beanstalk to steal a giant’s treasures, we instead get a glimpse at another, admittedly much more interesting plot to stop a war between giants and humans. It has a Jack the Giant-Slayer feel, you know, that 2013 movie with Nicholas Hoult? And since this book came out in 2015 I can’t help but wonder if Huchton was influenced by it, because it certainly doesn’t match the “Jack the Giant-Killer” fairy tale.
Either way, it was refreshing to read…once we actually got past the beanstalk climbing and the visit to the giants above.
The General Overview
In this retelling we see young Jacqueline Wallace, who prefers to go by Jack, trying to eke out a living with her drunk and abusive father. Despite his abuses and drinking and gambling problems, Jack continually tries to treat him with kindness. Her constant desire to give kindness above all else is actually woven into the entire story, and is the source of her victory at the end. Unfortunately it doesn’t go over as well in the beginning. They’re tenuous existence as father and daughter reaches a breaking point when someone her father owes a debt to comes collecting, and her father sends her away to sell their cows to cover it.
However Jack doesn’t even get the chance to sell the cows. One moment she’s taking a nap, the next the cows are missing and all she has to show for it is a pouch of mysterious, definitely magical beans. Which she then loses in a storm. Which then grow into a magnificent beanstalk. Of course, the ever curious and wanderlust-ridden Jack just has to know what’s at the top, so she climbs it.
This is where the story gets interesting. Jack finds a giant…but she also finds a young man playing beautiful music for her. However her rescue attempts fail once she realizes that the young man doesn’t want to be rescued at all — in fact he’s hiding from the pressure of being heir to the throne! His father, thinking him kidnapped or killed by the giants, has been waging war on them for two years since. Even this knowledge doesn’t deter the young prince, who insists on staying in his pretty cage, playing music for the giantess who lives there.
Disgusted with his selfishness, Jack escapes back down to the human world below, only to find herself inescapably tied to this problem of giants and humans in conflict. She is the one destined to bring peace to her homeland, and end the war between giants and humans.
Not only that, but her time up the beanstalk has awakened a buried hidden power in her — she’s a Bard, an individual gifted with magical talents in singing, dancing, playing instruments, and storytelling. The catch? She can’t escape her wanderlust, and staying anywhere for long becomes miserable and draining. Also she’s bound by her word, should she give it.
It was easily the coolest detail about the whole story. Jack gets to meet other Bards, but hones her skills more or less organically, through trial and error. Some songs were written out for us, simple but effective, but more often than not each musical experience was detailed out by Huchton’s excellent descriptive work. Several times I found myself wishing I could watch this book as a musical movie, to really appreciate each scene, but Huchton has an art for drawing you in and capturing you in special moments like that. Though some musical scenes fell flat (an unfortunate side effect of trying to capture such a sound-based moment in silent text), most of them were very well done.
The love story between Jack and Willem (not the selfish minstrel in the giant’s home in the clouds) is brief, but genuine. I wished there was more content, but as the story centered on Jack’s quest not only to find out who she is, but also to end the conflict between humans and giants, I could let the love story slide. It wasn’t the main plot, but it mingled nicely with it.
The Original Story Factor
In the original story, Jack climbs the beanstalk three times, each time returning with a treasure from the giants above. A bag of money, a hen who lays golden eggs, and a singing harp. In The Stillness of the Sky, however, there’s only one trip, and Jack doesn’t leave with anything more than a silver lute she uses for her Bard abilities.
You could say the singing harp did make an appearance, in the form of Prince Aaron the “captured” prince, which I actually really liked. In the tale, the harp betrays Jack by calling out for its master when Jack tries to steal it, showing loyalty to the giants. Similarly Aaron has no desire to leave his giant hostess.
Other than the beginning, the story didn’t really follow the original tale, but I was all right with that. One, I like when fairy tale retellings really transform a story. Not so much that the echoes of the original tale are unrecognizable, but enough to make it look like more than a fresh coat of paint. That’s what Huchton did here. Instead of adventures in the clouds, Jack used her knowledge of two particular individuals involved in the giant-human conflict that she met top the beanstalk to then save the world below before the fighting got too out of hand.
Also involved in this story was the tale of the Pied Piper, who was also genderbent and whose soul was more of the darker original tale than the quaint and abbreviated tale we sometimes know better. This Piper was a small villain who used her Bard abilities to attempt evil, until Jack put a stop to it. It was a riveting cameo, and I appreciated seeing the dark side of the Piper.
Additionally there were suggestions of a “Sleeping Beauty” connection, but I won’t go into it here. It’s a rather big spoiler, after all.
The Criticism
I said Huchton has an art for drawing in a reader, and that’s true…except, perhaps, with travel.
Much of the beginning of the story, and some parts immediately after Jack left the cloud world above, involved Jack travelling. And I won’t lie, I found myself skimming for a reprieve. The beginning was too dull for me, which made it harder for me to finish. The story picked up once Jack obtained her quest and set out on it, but that didn’t happen until Chapter 8 when she encountered a magical force who literally had to tell her what to do (albeit it in a very cryptic way). And even that encounter fell flat.
Most of the problem was that Jack was alone. With literally no one to talk to save herself, it was just pages of description of travel. With a lot of Jack internally convincing herself of reasons to do whatever she was doing. It was hard to slog through.
As a general rule of thumb, I think that if a character has to spell out reasons why they’re doing whatever they’re doing, it’s dull and poor writing. I think Huchton attempted to showcase a more timid and unsure side of Jack, but all I ended up getting out of it was pages of explanations that I felt could be better off showed, rather than told. But Jack didn’t have anyone else to bounce these things off of, either in dialogue or action, so thus we ended up with a lot of internal self-convincing.
In contrast, once the story picked up and we got to see Jack using her Bard abilities and solve the mystery of who she was (which was a big surprise!) as well as make efforts to stop the war between humans and giants, there were moments that felt too rushed. I felt we could have lingered a bit more on the romance between Jack and Willem, which sprang up a little too quickly. Willem claims to have had dreams of Jack for years, but it’s never answered who is giving him these dreams, and Jack is just a little too willing to accept his love for her based on the fact that he knows more about her from his sleeping hours than his waking ones.
I think that, altogether, the story might have benefitted from less in the beginning and a little more meat in the middle. Or, perhaps, just introducing Willem earlier. If one is going to have a relationship, especially in a fairy tale retelling, one must make strides to avoid the “insta-love” plague (unless you’re using it in a unique way).
Jack and Will were cute though. I will admit that.
Final Thoughts
Even though the pacing was off in places and the story was hard to get into, I did enjoy the twists and surprises in this story. Huchton continues to weave a cohesive world for her characters, though they’re all in different kingdoms, and the throwbacks and hints pointing back to Shadows on Snow were welcome and exciting.
I also thoroughly enjoyed this idea of Bards and their abilities, and can’t wait to see what other sort of magical things are going to happen in the rest of her series. Though I might take a break and go a different route for my next reading. I have been dying to reread Cinder lately, and there’s nothing more different in the fairy tale retelling world than a futuristic Earth setting.
Who knows what I’ll end up reading next. Check back next Saturday to find out!